PARISH PLAN UPDATE 20

THE PARISH PLAN IS PUBLISHED:-

The Parish Plan document completed, published and in circulation.

It seems it has been well received and has already received acclaim from members and officers of Shropshire Council as well as many local Parish Councillors both within West Felton, surrounding parishes and others across Shropshire.

These remain difficult political times, with stringency measures running alongside continuing efforts to restore the national economy by promoting house-building. The timely publication of our Parish Plan, with its very clear messages about local people’s wishes, including a highly significant 89% expressed, democratic wish for the parish to remain ‘Open Countryside’ within Shropshire Council’s SAMDev Local Development Plan, give the parish the strongest possible defence against over development. Equally, the opportunities are now in place to progress towards your identified measures to improve the quality of life within West Felton on a whole range of matters.

The full Parish Plan report includes 166 pages of information about our parish, including charts, tables, photographs and pictorial representations, mostly in colour, about its social and industrial history, as well as the presentation of the current views of its residents of all ages and local businesses.

As mentioned in the last edition, the cost of publishing and distributing such a document parish-wide was too high to do within the reasonable levels of publically-funded budget available, which is why the summary document was produced and delivered with your last copy. We hope you have found that both interesting and valuable. At this stage, just 25 copies of the full report have been printed. They have been distributed to:

Steering Group members (9) - for their ongoing information and that of local people on a lend-out by request basis.

Shropshire Council (10) – for the information of relevant departments for evaluation and implementation, where possible of identified improvements.

West Felton Parish Council (2 – Chair and Clerk) – for consideration, evaluation and implementation of possible parish improvements. (A further 2 Councillors also have copies as Steering Group members).

Oswestry Area Committee Secretary (1) - for consideration etc of potential joint, local-parish projects.

Oswestry Reference Library (1) - for public reference.

West Felton C o E Primary School (1) - for local reference and education.

The Planning Inspectorate (1) – as evidence in relation to the Planning appeal against Shropshire Council Planning Committee’s refusal on application 14/00734/OUT, Land between Twyford Lane and Holyhead Road.

Your Steering Group have comprised 16 people, most of whom have stuck to the task since March last year. As always happens, circumstances pressed a few to have to give up their active commitment. Those who have remained active throughout and therefore are in receipt of copies of the full plan are:

Steve Haworth (Chair); Ian Walker (Vice-Chair); Heather & Matt Gibson (Secretary); Pat Mabe (Treasurer); Chris (Cllr.) Jones; Chris (Jonesey) Jones; Pauline Lovegrove; John Houghton; David Inns; Corrie Davies (Shropshire Council Community Action Team).

Therefore, if you wish to view a full copy and do not have access to the internet, where it can be found on the Parish Council’s website at http://shropshire.net/westfeltonparishcouncil you can either visit Oswestry library or contact anyone of these members if they are known to you. Otherwise, please contact Parish Clerk, Ian Hutchinson on iahutchinson@btinternet.com or 01743 850504, WFPC’s Chair, David Curtis on 01691 610665 or Steve Haworth on 01691 610126. Every effort will be made to make a copy available to you on a temporary basis.

Previously active Steering Group members have been: Mick Davis, Pete Sturgess and Gordon McCoombe. Thanks are due for their efforts before events proscribed their continuation.

The Shropshire Council Departments so far afforded copies are:

Planning Policy, Planning Committee, Highways Authority, Economic Development, Tourism, Countryside/Outdoor Recreation/Biodiversity, Research& Stats, Community Action Team, Cllr. Steve Charmley.

Between the various public groups now in possession of your democratically expressed wishes, work is being undertaken particularly through your Parish Council to determine ways of making things happen, albeit we must expect that not everything will be possible.

In the last edition thanks were afforded to many people who had contributed to the successful completion of this plan. Thanks are also due to:

Ø Bert Bliss and the distributors and management team of ‘Round and About West Felton’ the parish-magazine for their help in collating and distributing questionnaires.

Ø Local artists for their help in illustrations for the report.

Ø West Felton C o E Primary School and its staff.

Ø Local participating secondary and tertiary colleges.

Ø The Village Hall committee.

Ø Shropshire Council and West Felton Parish Council for their financial support.

Once again many thanks to all those who answered the questionnaires on behalf of your community.

The Parish Plan blogsite can be viewed at:- http://wfparishplan.blogspot.co.uk .

This is likely to be the final Parish Plan update, as future issues will be taken on board by your Parish Council. Thanks you for reading.

PARISH PLAN UPDATE 19

PARISH PLAN –THE SUMMARY OF RESULTS IS UPON US:-

The final Parish Plan document is nearing completion. The document comprises about 200 pages, including many charts, showing the views of the many residents, businesses, young people and parish-society members. The work with local businesses can be considered ground-breaking and is not usually attempted within community led plans. This is also true of the environment report, which shows much of the history and heritage of this parish, alongside a considerable number of local maps, data and tables on our natural and land-based surroundings.

The result is that we are only able to publish a summary of the findings and recommendations of the Parish Plan within this magazine.

In future magazines, the environment report will be serialised for your interest.

However, all the documents will be available to read on line soon at or via the following web addresses:

http://shrop.net/westfeltonparishcouncil

Hard copy Parish Plan reports will be available from various locations within the parish or via either, the Parish Clerk, Ian Hutchinson at: iahutchinson@btinternet.com or 01743 850504. Otherwise through Steve Haworth on 01691 610126, or on line, via the Parish Plan blogsite, which is at:- wfparishplan.blogspot.co.uk .

The Parish Plan Steering Committee wishes to record its thanks to the residents, young people and local businesses who took the time to complete the various questionnaires which have made this plan possible. This work is a major benefit for the future development of this parish up to 2026.

Thanks also go out to Corrie Davies of Shropshire Council’s Community Action Team and to Renee Wallace and Maxine Smith of The Community Council for Shropshire, whose advice and extended efforts have helped considerably to allow this plan to progress. We should all be very grateful to them.

Also, for myself and on your behalf I would like to record thanks to the Steering Committee itself, which have been working since March 2013 to get this work done and have committed 1,497 of known unpaid, voluntary, working hours to the task, including some hard and complex work with Shropshire Council’s Planning Committee.

From the residents’ survey, there were 38 residents who put their names forward for potential, future voluntary work within and on behalf of the Parish. We hope to contact each of them in the coming weeks to what type of work they might be interested in doing and to see if and how that can be developed.

The Parish Plan Summary is included with this edition of ‘Round and About West Felton’. We hope you find it both interesting and enlightening. Once again, very many thanks to all who took part in it.

PARISH PLAN UPDATE 18

MOVING TOWARDS COMPLETION:-

Those of you who have been regular readers of this column will know that this whole Parish Plan process began in February last year (2013). The initial meeting was in March last year at the Village Hall when 85 of our parish citizens turned out to express their views and find out about the parish plan process. – Time flies eh?

After that a steering group of 15 residents was set up to make this plan happen.

Making it happen has meant liaising with officers at Shropshire Council, our parish council and the Rural Communities Council as well as accessing financial grants to cover the costs.

Since that time the steering group has met at least once a month, set up individual working groups to cover different aspects to the plan and put in a very considerable amount of unpaid, voluntary time – well in to four figures - on your behalf.

All those groups are now completing their work and we enter the final stages of the process; collating these many activities into a single report document which will be made available for residents to read on-line or in hard copy.

The hard-copy, colour document is expected to be over 100 pages in length and will therefore be published in limited numbers to minimise printing costs. As a result a summary document will also be produced for publication within this magazine in due course. We will also let you know how and where you can access a full copy of the report should you so wish, particularly for those of you without access to the Internet.

You can expect the following within your report:-

Full questionnaire results and related charts for:-

The household questionnaire

The young people’s questionnaire

The school children’s questionnaire

The local business questionnaire – Many thanks to David Inns.

The environmental working group report. -Look out for this. This is a brilliant piece of work on West Felton’s heritage, its nature and its assets, with relevant photos and maps showing the locations of the many features described. John Houghton has done the vast majority of this work and deserves a great vote of thanks for his considerable efforts on our behalf.

The churches and communities report. – Many thanks to Pat Mabe and Pauline Lovegrove.

The liaison with adjacent parishes report. – Many thanks to Ian Walker.

An explanation of the work of the other working groups, most of which has gone in to the questions developed for the questionnaires.

A summary of recommendations.

Conclusions.

We are of course aware that none of this work will be of any use unless the report is distributed to relevant council officers and other organisations able to implement any of the recommendations you have put forward to improve this our shared parish. Equally it must be recognised that relevant progress will need to be both monitored and driven in order to achieve as many as possible of the improvements you democratically seek.

We must all be aware too that it is unlikely that we will be able to implement all the recommendations. However the compilation of this plan is an essential part of local democratic empowerment driven from Central Government.

Some of the more urgently needed findings from the Plan have already been circulated to relevant Council departments and other organisations to inform them of the needs and wishes of the general West Felton Parish residents and business users’ views.

May I on behalf of the Steering Group and Parish Council thank all of you who have taken an active part in this process and all who took the time to complete the various questionnaires. We hope to be able to publish the final report within the next two months, in the mean-time keep watching this space.

Our Parish Plan blogsite is:- wfparishplan.blogspot.co.uk for ongoing information about the Plan’s progress.

Steve Haworth can be contacted about any aspects of ongoing Parish Plan work on 610126.

PARISH PLAN UPDATE 17

AND THE WINNERS ARE !! :-

Those many readers who read and completed their Parish Plan household questionnaires will recall that, for those returning their names and addresses on the tear off forms at the back, there was a cash-prize draw!

The questionnaires were collated for us at the Rural Communities Council in Shrewsbury and we asked them to conduct the draw once the tear-off forms had been detached from the questionnaires. They have done that for us and here are the results:

1^st Prize - £50 – Maurice G Teague of Applewood Heights

2^nd Prize - £30 – Sarah Creaser-Ogden of School Road

3^rd Prize - £20 – Luke Gill of Fox Lane

All the above have been contacted and have agreed to the publication of their names by us.

Their cheques are to be presented to them within the next week.

We also await returns from local leisure service providers to repay the £5 activity vouchers presented to the 20 local young people who gave their time to completing the youth questionnaire, which is also, alongside the primary school-children’s survey, being incorporated into the Parish Plan.

The response to the Parish Plan, even in its draft form as it currently is have been eagerly awaited and have received acclaim from our Shropshire Council representative. The results of the draft plan business questionnaire are already being presented to various potential sources of grants etc., for business development and a short-list of relevant organisations and departments within Shropshire Council is being worked out for further delivery.

In the meantime, final work is being conducted to prepare a final draft of the Plan, with each of the working groups putting together details of their group-work, some of it considerable. They are also preparing their time-sheets to account for the many hundreds of hours of volunteer time they have put in since March 2013 in preparing and completing the plan. Well done to them for so much effort on behalf of our parish!

One completed there will be a number of colour copies of the Plan printed for local representatives, Council members wanting copies and the various agencies who will need copies to determine how they can help deliver, where possible the changes people have been asking for to improve parish life here.

The Parish Plan will also be available on-line and we will be looking to find one or more suitable places to leave copies for public inspection, with a few spare to lend out. – Colour copies will be costly, but are necessary to adequately show off the many charts and graphs within the plan.

An executive summary of the report will be written and, hopefully included in a later edition of ‘Round and About West Felton’ for people to peruse.

Our Parish Plan blogsite is:- wfparishplan.blogspot.co.uk for ongoing information about the Plan’s progress.

Steve Haworth can be contacted about any aspects of ongoing Parish Plan work on 610126.

PARISH PLAN UPDATE 16

THE PEOPLE SPEAK !!

We now have the results of the household and youth questionnaires returned from our collators. The detail of these will of course become a major part of the Parish Plan report, which we hope to publish in a few months’ time.

The steering group decided to at least deliver a summary of the results to everyone, within the relevant ‘Round and About West Felton’ magazine. However, no doubt most of you will be interested to find out what the major expressed opinions have been from these questionnaire, so below is a summary of these. It is emphasised that this is only a summary and there are many other findings which cannot be published here for lack of space.

The household questionnaire response was from 31% of the community, which is a similar return for other parishes. The young people’s questionnaire returned about 18% and is not comparable to other parishes because no-one else has done it.

Most respondents were, as would be expected from West Felton village. However, there was some reply from each village and hamlet within the parish.

Household questionnaire – main findings:

Main things people do like in the parish	Main other things people would like in the parish.	Main things people generally do not want

Countryside location; Relaxed place to live Local environment; Sense of community; Heritage	Less speeding, better parking facilities, better broadband, better mobile phone coverage.	Wind Farms; Wind turbines; Fracking Units; Fields of solar panels
Village store	Bowling and adult exercise/sport facilities	Dog Fouling; Litter.
Church, WI, Garden Club, Flexors	Additional social & leisure clubs
“Open Countryside” SAMDev designation. (89% in favour).	Additional recycling facilities; Info about Air and ground source heat pumps.
Public open spaces	More jobs (light industry, horticulture, tourism, health-centre).	More HGV and high volume traffic
	More info on walking/cycling routes and heritage
Post Office in West Felton; Shopping and library in Oswestry	Small numbers of affordable houses & bungalows across the parish in similar relation to current village/hamlet size.	Too much housing development;
West Felton Carnival	More public open spaces
70 Bus; Rail from Gobowen	Weekday buses before 9am and after 7pm and Saturdays after 7pm.
	Dedicated cycle route to Oswestry
	National rail services available from Oswestry

Things worth spending Parish Council money on:

Facilities for:

Traffic-speed control; Pub/restaurant; Older people; Children & Young people; Natural Environment; Disabled people; People without access to cars; Off-road parking; Restricting housing development.

Young People’s findings

Main things YPs do like in the parish	Main other things YPs would like in the parish.	Main things YPs generally do not want

Relaxed, friendly place; countryside environment; school, shop; playground facilities; particularly the carnival	Local cinema; Better Broadband & mobile p[hone signal;	Speeding Traffic
	More sport facilities, rock-climbing; youth club	More housing
	Buses to Baschurch, Gobowen (railway) and Shrewsbury (Battlefield).	Overgrown hedges blocking pavements
	Cycle racks in West Felton village centre
	Better job prospects locally
	More leisure facilities
	Better parking facilities around shop and school.

There is still more information to come of course. Your steering group and still working hard especially on the business questionnaire results and environment.

Our Parish Plan blogsite is:- wfparishplan.blogspot.co.uk for ongoing information about the Plan’s progress.

Steve Haworth can be contacted about any aspects of ongoing Parish Plan work on 610126.

PARISH PLAN UPDATE 15

WHAT DID YOU SAY?

We now wait with great anticipation for the results of your questionnaires to be returned. Hopefully, by the time you are reading this we will have had our first draft report back from the Rural Communities Council (RCC), giving our community’s returns from the household questionnaire and the youth questionnaire. These will be added to the return already received from our school during last year to produce a comprehensive report on what we as a community think about our current local situation and how we would like it to develop over the coming years.

Once your parish plan steering group have had the opportunity to consider these findings and agree to a final draft with RCC – (and pay for their services) – we will be able to work towards a final Parish Plan Report. This will include the findings from all our working groups and the questionnaires put separately to our societies, churches and businesses.

Of course there is thus a great deal of work still to do. We do though now have the information we need to inform us, our relevant Councils and other organisations, such as local colleges and voluntary groups about future needs and community wishes for West Felton parish.

We have also been considering some of the things this parish plan group have already achieved during the consultation process, often in coordination with the Parish Council.

These include:

· Putting forward community views (against) the proposed pylon line from Mid Wales to Lower Frankton and support the ‘Alliance’ against the pylons.

· Fighting for the general, clear majority, community view against further large housing developments.

· Having site meetings with relevant public service representatives about dog-fouling, speeding traffic and parking.

· Expressing community concerns about the future for our wonderful school.

· Establishing a photographic record of some of West Felton’s past.

· Attaining an interactive mapping tool for keeping a future record of notable places with the parish.

· Establishing improved links with neighbouring parishes to determine relevant jointly held concerns.

On housing, we have recently received the result of the group’s secondary complaint to Shropshire Council about the Planning Committee’s decision to approve the outline application 35 houses + 4 commercial units on land north of Tedsmore Road, as well as some interesting ‘Freedom of Information’ requests. The complaint was investigated and considered by their complaints department and has determined that there was no maladministration by the Planning Department.

The Steering Group will now have to decide whether to take this one further and final step in putting the matter before the Local Government Ombudsman.

There is still no determination for the other 64 houses for which Planning applications have been submitted recently. The major two applications are for 25 houses at ‘The Cross,’ being on land opposite Dovaston Court, across Holyhead Road and for 32 house to the north of Dovaston Court, where the horses currently graze. These will be determined by the full North Area Planning Committee but as yet no date has been allocated.

Some of you may remember that our original plan was to have the Parish Plan report completed about now and to be in a position to distribute completed summaries to you through our hard working ‘Round and About West Felton’ volunteer distributors.

Events, particularly in relation to fighting housing issues have rather overtaken us and there is some slippage in the schedule as a result. We now hope that we can be finalising the plan and begin distribution in the Autumn.

By that time, no doubt, most of our young people who took the trouble to complete their questionnaires will have been able to take up their opportunity for £5 - £80 activity vouchers through our local leisure providers. We also await the draw for the three winners of the household questionnaires cash prizes!

Our Parish Plan blogsite is:- wfparishplan.blogspot.co.uk for ongoing information about the Plan’s progress.

Steve Haworth can be contacted about any aspects of ongoing Parish Plan work on 610126.

PARISH PLAN UPDATE 14

THOSE QUESTIONNAIRES ! – On-line at: http://bit.ly/1fxq6Te

For those almost 200 of you who have completed and forwarded your household questionnaires we offer you many thanks. This is a good number and better than most Parishes have achieved. We would of course have preferred more of the 609 distributed to have been returned. All we can do of course is offer people the democratic opportunity to have their say. For those of you who have not completed the forms, there is still an opportunity to do so on line at the above web-address, which will remain open until Tuesday 27^th May. I am no longer collecting any hard copies, my shoes are getting worn out. If you do not complete a form, that is of course your decision but please don’t complain if things are not done as you would have wished. You have had your opportunity. You must hope that the many people who have completed their forms have the same opinions as you do. That will be our assumption.

There is still an opportunity for the young people to complete their forms and return them through their schools, colleges or to me at ‘The Rowan House’, Tedsmore Road in West Felton but you need to be quick. Remember there are activity vouchers for completions worth between £5 and £80 depending on which activity you choose. The forms take about 5 minutes to complete. It’s your decision.

Also the team will be making a last effort in the coming week to collect West Felton business questionnaire returns. Then we really will have to shut up shop and get on with determining what the results are of the Parish Plan returns, so that we can in turn inform Shropshire Council and other relevant organisations what local people want for the future of our wonderful parish.

At our latest meeting, we spent much time getting up to date with the situation relating to the 99 housing and 4 commercial unit planning applications received for this Parish to date, since the Parish declared itself ‘Countryside’ under Shropshire Council’s SAMDev policy. Those of you who are wondering why West Felton have received this many, when many other local parishes which want development have far fewer will, like us perhaps be somewhat perplexed.

It is the unfortunate truth that Shropshire Council’s SAMDev policy is not yet complete and is being overridden, despite primary English Law, (The Localism Act 2011), by the Government’s secondary law Planning guidance, (The National Planning Policy Framework – NPPF). It seems that the Shropshire Planning officers believe through that secondary legislation that they have no option but to grant permissions to would-be developers, despite the many paragraphs within the NPPF which define ‘Sustainable Development’ as having a ‘Presumption in favour’, rather than just any development proposal at all. Sadly too, only a few of the North Area Planning Committee members seem to have taken the trouble to read the NPPF, the rest relying on the advice of those same planning officers who cannot it seems judge the word ‘sustainable’ to mean anything different to ‘any’.

However, all is not yet lost and having now complained to the second and final stage of complaint to Shropshire Council, your steering group, backed by the Parish Council, await the response of the Complaints Department as to whether or not the correct procedures and advice were followed by Planners in coming to the decisions made so far.

No decisions have yet been taken on the other 64 houses for which Planning applications have been submitted recently.

Each of the Parish Plan working groups will now begin to write up their individual chapters for the final report, showing all the hundreds of hours of voluntary work they have put in and the results of that work on your behalf. In the meantime, ‘The Rural Communities Council’ will be drawing up the collated results from the questionnaires returned, so that a complete Plan report can be drafted.

In good time all this will be put together into a document for distribution to households around the Parish, as well as to those agencies who will use it to determine development (in the widest sense of the word) for this Parish in the coming decade or so.

We also await the result of the draw, to see who from those entries will receive the £100 of cash prizes.

Once again, many thanks to those of you who took the trouble and perhaps an hour of your time to complete the household questionnaires and to the young people who have completed theirs. We certainly hope you thoroughly enjoy your activity vouchers!

Our Parish Plan blogsite is:- wfparishplan.blogspot.co.uk for ongoing information about the Plan’s progress.

Steve Haworth can be contacted about any aspects of ongoing Parish Plan work on 610126.

PARISH PLAN UPDATE 13

COMPLETE THOSE QUESTIONNAIRES PLEASE ! – By hand or on-line at: http://bit.ly/1fxq6Te

Hopefully, you will all by now have had your household questionnaires, with last month’s magazine. If you have not received yours, then please ring Steve Haworth on 610126. We’ll arrange to get one to you quickly.

We’re already into 3 figures for completed ones, but we do need those outstanding ones please. They’re being collated and processed for us by the Rural Communities Council, (RCC). I know from them that a lot have also been completed on-line. It took me about half an hour to complete mine and send it off on-line. My wife filled in the hard-copy in about the same time.

We are so keen to get everyone’s opinions and ideas though, so please take the time to get your views recorded by completing your form or via the http address above. The Parish Plan is such an important document for our community and will carry real weight for the future of the parish through the next 10 years or so. People’s views are so valuable and needed.

Opinions given will always remain anonymous. The opportunity to win the cash prizes of £50, £30 and £20 still remains. Of course we need people’s details for these, but these are given on the last page, which is removed before collation by the RCC staff, who are also doing the prize draw.

The completed forms can be dropped off in a voting box at West Felton Stores, or, when school re-opens in a similar box there. We have to have a cut-off date, so that we can get on with completing the Plan report using everyone’s ideas and opinions. So, the last possible time for getting your questionnaire in, will be 9am on Tuesday 6^th May – immediately after the May-day bank holiday.

School and College students aged 11-17 years are also being given their opportunity to complete a separate questionnaire, delivered and presented to them through their various schools and colleges around the area. At this stage we’ve only had 15 completions in, so again, we hope for many more. There are well over 100 of you! You can either deliver them to me at The Rowan House, Tedsmore Road, SY11 4EN or through School/College in the week after the Easter holiday. They’ll only take about 10 minutes to complete, but don’t forget to let me or your school/college sign them off, so that you get your activity voucher (see below).

The last page of their questionnaire is a voucher for their choice of West Felton leisure activity. This could be at Queens Head Paddle Club or at Rednal, for Skateboard, Paint-Ball, Karting, Laser-Quest, Archery, Segway, Sky-Dive or Hover-Days. The value of the voucher is between £5 and £80 to the students, depending on the choice of activity, though the cost to the Parish Plan is just £5 a time. For this we must thank Shropshire Council for the grant made available and to the activity providers for their generosity and assistance with the arrangements.

Students under 17 do need parental permission and accompaniment to the activities and a signature on the form from school/college, or me, to say they have completed the questionnaire. All the details of the activities, with contact details for information and booking places are on the voucher.

The future is of course very much for our young people and that is why we especially want their opinions and ideas about the parish too.

There is still a lot of other activity ongoing. There are still West Felton business questionnaires being collected and our environment group are working hard on getting the interactive mapping system together for the parish, showing our many places of interest.

The subject of housing development remains an issue. The Steering Group, whilst awaiting the results of people’s opinions on future development, are actively engaged in trying to ensure that Shropshire Council’s Planning Authority remains fair in its decisions about the several ongoing housing development applications within the parish.

Once again, PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO COMPLETE A QUESTIONNAIRE. Your and you family’s views really do matter and can form a lasting legacy towards the future progress of our parish – but only if you complete it.

Our Parish Plan blogsite is:- wfparishplan.blogspot.co.uk for those old photographs and ongoing information about the Plan’s progress.

Steve Haworth can be contacted about any aspects of ongoing Parish Plan work on 610126.

West Felton Parish Plan

Sunday 23 November 2014

SEE THE FULL PARISH PLAN 2014 ON-LINE

Parish Plan Updates 20 -13

PARISH PLAN UPDATE 20

PARISH PLAN UPDATE 13