Last Week’s West Area Committee

This meeting of the West Area Committee was at Grove Wood Primary School. It was quite well attended with about 30 members of the public there. Here’s a few of the points:

* Most of the public who came lived in the Grove Road area and were concerned about youth nuisance in the nearby park, plus kids at 2 am clambering over the roof of the very building we were sitting in, and nuisance drivers racing around local streets at night-time. Unfortunately the police weren’t scheduled to be at this meeting , so the issues will have to be dealt with next time.

* There were some pointed questions from residents about recycling – is the stuff really being recycled, and are the council going to be issuing fines for not recycling properly? Strangely , none of the Conservative councillors present – including two cabinet members – wanted to answer, so it was left to the Lib Dem Leader of the Opposition to explain where all the stuff goes to!

*Richard Foster was one of the public who came along and made some good points. Richard was the Tory Chairman of the Planning Committee in the mid-1980s. One thing about Richard was that he actually voted with the Liberal Councillors at that time on a few issues , such as nitrates in drinking water. Which shows the change in the Tory Group between then and now – Richard wasn’t deprived of his Chairmanship just because he voted with us once in a while.

*Chris Black asked the chap from County Highways about the funds paid by a developer five years ago for a Downhall Park Way / Rawreth Lane Pedestrian Crossing. Had the money really been returned to the developer because the money hadn’t been used in the allotted time? The answer was yes., although County Highways were working on a feasibility study for a crossing using funds from elsewhere. Ron Oatham said that the loss of this money was disgusting, and asked if any heads had rolled.

* We had two people from the Primary Care Trust to talk about local health care. Their aim is to build a “Primary Care Centre” for Rayleigh which will have some GPs working in it, plus facilities for x-rays, blood tests, physiotherapy etc. The problem is that they are looking for a site of one or two acres in Rayleigh and they can’t find one. Under pressure from Ron Oatham they agreed that they had been far too slow in trying to get the site at Park School which went to Asda.

*Several people suggested that they probably will never get a one or two acre site for half of Rayleigh GPs plus other facillities. Chris Black asked why they can’t just leave all the GPs where they are, and put the facilities into a smaller building such as the nclinci in Eastwood Road…..