A United Conservative Team

We were clear in our opposition to Lib-Lab policies like introducing a fee for first permit holders in residents parking zones and the Lib Dem policy to scrap the weekly bin collection.

On 18th May Freemantle will have its first big community festival in years. A lot of hard work from local residents is going into putting on a really fun day. Freemantle and Shirley Ward councillors are going and if people want to raise any local issues with us we will be glad to help.


Below is a message from the festival organisers:

There will be dancing, bands, swimming, bouncy castles and giant inflatables, local food, drinks, information tents, local radio DJs, Scout Movement, Guide Movement, Southampton Mayor, tattoos, messy play, duck pond, environmental and recycling, hog-roast, celidh, herbs, African drumming, face painting, circus skills, raffle, and many, many more things to do on the day. Admission is free.Many local businesses are being generous in providing donations for the event. The festival team are currently collecting prizes for what promises to be a bonanza raffle. It is not too late to get involved with the festival and make your contribution. We are keen to hear from individuals who would like to help on the day, or could distribute publicity material in advance.

The Festival is supported by K2, SCC, St Marks School, Friends of The Field, YMCA and GMB.

For more information contact Rebecca Kinge, Tel 023 8052 8123, www.communityhub.info

The local election campaign in Southampton has officially started today. Candidate nominations for the city council elections on 1st of May have been published. Click HERE for a link to the full list.

This election is a crucial one (more so than most years) as firstly, it will be the last local election held in Southampton before the next General Election and secondly there are no council elections until May 2010. This means whichever party (or combination of parties) wins in May will be the administration for 2 years.

The choice is very simple: a coalition of Labour and the Lib Dems or the Conservatives. Locally people have seen all three political parties in office. We have had 20 years of Labour, 4 years of the Lib Dems, and 10 months of Conservatives. The Conservative Administration's term was cut short by the new Lab-Lib Pact.

In 10 months the Conservatives showed real conviction and leadership, as well as an ability to compromise but not at the expense of principle or commitments made to the electorate. In 10 months the city really started to move forward at a pace.

Now we have the Lab-Lib pact which in just 6 weeks is starting to fall apart. It is a coalition build on sand by two parties which can't stand each other and share only one thing in common - the need to be in power at all costs. You only have to look at their local party websites to see what they think of each other. They aren't communicating, have no shared policy platform (or indeed any policies that I can spot) and are lumbering from one disaster to another.

The nominations show a few interesting points, namely:

Milbrook. Despite announcing his resignation, former Lib Dem councillor Ken Darke has after all, decided to stand. His comments in the Daily Echo can be read HERE.

Sholing. UKIP have decided not to put up a candidate this year despite doing so for many many years. This will no doubt help the Conservatives and will put Labour Leader, Cllr June Bridle under even more pressure.

Bitterne. Former Labour Councillor, Paul Jenks is hoping to get back on the Council. Paul Jenks has stood and lost all over Southampton and although he may be hoping Bitterne will be his ticket back onto the Council. I am not so sure.

Peartree. Ex Lib Dem, Nora Goss is standing in her former ward Peatree. Nora is a popular character and no doubt will poll very well.


Smaller Parties. There are 8 Green candidates this year. The Greens are starting to become quite a force and in Southampton and we may see in future years them push the Lib Dems into 4th place in the city. This is close to being the case in many wards. It is good to see that there are no BNP candidates this year as there have been in recent years. Finally we have a new party called Southampton First standing in a couple of wards.

This evening I went to a school governor training session at Mount Pleasant Junior School, on subject of the Extended Schools agenda.

All schools will have to have an extended schools programme in place by 2010 and in Southampton, schools will be expected to group together in clusters to deliver this.

It will involve all children being offered activities or child care provision from 8am in the morning till 6pm in the evening in the form of a wrap around scheme to the school timetable.

This is a subject which I am very interested in and it was the subject of my motion to full council last week. Schools are expected to work with other bodies in the city to deliver the programme and I have been strongly pushing for the city council to take up the offer made by Southampton Solent University use its 1,500 sports undergraduates to teach sports classes in city schools.

In the end my motion to council wasn't carried and Labour and Lib Dem councillors decided not to push ahead with the scheme and not to commit funding for a pilot. They did say that it was worth investigating but they in effect neutered the proposal by taking out the money and a deadline for implementation.

I am still confident that in time the scheme will get off the ground as its such as fantastic opportunity for the city.

I now have a new website up and running for my Parliamentary campaign: www.jeremymoulton.com.

At moment it is just a few basic pages but I will be adding to it when I get some spare time. I will still keep this blog going with my comments on issues in Freemantle and in Southampton. The website will focus a bit more on national issues in the run up to the next General Election.

On Monday I went along to the first Cabinet meeting since the Lab-Lib pact on the council took power on 20th February.

The first thing to say is that they survived without any obvious gaffes. Everyone was on their best behaviour.

It was quite clear to me however that this new Cabinet is totally dominated by Labour. Of the 4 Lib Dem cabinet members, 1 wasn't there, 2 didn't speak at all, leaving Cllr Adrian Vinson who had only limited involvement in the discussions. Indeed there was more debate generated by Labour and Conservative backbenchers who asked questions from the audience.

Despite claims to the contrary it was appear that the Lib Dems are very much the junior partner in this relationship and in the words of Nick Clegg MP are simply "an annex to another party" - in this case Old Labour.

All there is for the Lib Dems in this sorry set up is a false feeling of importance, a slightly smoothed ego and a few pennies for their front benchers. For Lib Dems voters there is nothing of what they voted for.

Later on today the full council will be debating the merits of the Lab-Lib pact. I am looking froward to the debate.

The Conservatives have opened up a 16 point lead on Labour, according to a YouGov survey for the Sunday Times.

Support for Labour fell to 27 per cent - its lowest poll rating since 1983 - with the Conservatives on 43 per cent and the Liberal Democrats on 16 per cent.

David Cameron would have enough for a Commons majority if the results of the Sunday Times survey were repeated in a general election. The Conservatives would have a 120 seat majority in Parliament and a string of high profile cabinet ministers, including John Denham, Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, would lose their Commons seats.

Both Southampton seats would turn blue if the national swing was uniform which would also see Alan Whitehead lose his seat.

The poll also found that there has been a slump in Gordon Brown's personal approval, with the -26 rating the lowest since he became prime minister.

Yesterday's ICM poll for the Guardian showed a 13 point lead, with the Conservatives on 42%.

I enjoyed a much needed break from local election campaigning this afternoon.

Along with other Conservative Councillors and local council candidates I joined thousands of other runners to do the Sport Relief race in the city centre.

More sport is one of key policies Conservatives in Southampton are pushing.

On Wednesday I am leading a debate in Full Council on Conservative plans for a scheme to dramatically increase the amount of sport provision for children locally.

A few weeks ago Labour and Lib Dem councillors rejected the scheme but I am hopeful that on Wednesday they will have a change of heart, back the policy and back my motion to council. Last week a cross party panel of councillors, who have been carrying out a study into youth services in the city, gave their wholehearted support to the scheme.

Yesterday local Conservatives announced plans for a pioneering scheme to dramatically increase the amount of sport provision for children in Southampton. The Conservative led council is looking to work in partnership with Southampton Solent University to provide 5,000 hours of after school sports training each year.

Initially a pilot scheme will be run with sports studies undergraduates from Southampton Solent coaching children at a number of schools in the city. If the scheme proves popular then it will be extended to all interested schools and it is hoped that the scheme could double to 10,000 hours a year. This is a fantastic scheme which will help tackle childhood obesity as well as anti social behaviour.

The proposal forms part of the Conservative budget proposals for the city due to be voted on by all political parties on 20th February. The proposals from local Conservatives come on the back of a report this week from David Cameron about how we can improve the development of young people in Britain and increase accessibility to sports and other activities within and outside school.

It has been a busy and eventful week in Southampton Politics. My casework post bag gone up considerably since the start of the year and there is lots going on in the city.


Council Tax

On Wednesday the BBC ran a story on how across the country council tax is set to rocket again this year as local councils continue to face cut backs in funding from the government. I did an interview on the Ten O'clock News and was able to highlight how Southampton, being in the South of England, is suffering in particular from government underfunding.

One area where Southampton is under severe financial pressure is over the issue of the national concessionary bus fares scheme due to come in on 1st April. This was announced by Gordon Brown as a pre election sweetener just before the 2005 General Election. The government promised the fund the free travel scheme but has since gone back on its pledge and is trying to shift the costs to the local council tax payer. In Southampton the shortfall in funding could be up to £1m or more (about 1.5% on council tax!)


Hill Lane Toucan Crossing

I went along to the public meeting regarding the possible Toucan crossing at Raymond Road / Hill Lane. From the conversations that I had people seemed to be broadly in favour. One issue that lots of people raised was the need to improve cycle paths around the city. If the Hill Lane crossing is popular and goes ahead then there is the opportunity to link up a cycle path through the common to the Avenue, and then up to Wilton Road and King Edwards School.


St Mark's School

I went along to the St Mark's school governors meeting on Tuesday evening to talk with them about the the council's plans to purchase the Civil Service Sports Ground in Stafford Road and also about the primary school review which is about to start in the city.


Promoting the City's Art

On Thursday I went to a reception at the civic centre art gallery, organised by Business Southampton. The new Conservative administration is looking to expand the council's art lease scheme, where works of art are loaned out to offices, private collectors and other galleries. The art gallery has far more paintings than it can hope to display and so this is an opportunity to display the art and also generate some income which can be used to meet the costs of the gallery and promote art and local artists in the city.

I spent Friday learning all about what happens to our household waste. We started the day with a morning at the Marchwood Incinerator (or Energy Recovery Facility), then visited the Recycling processing centre in Alton (or Materials Recovery Facility), and finally the Little Bushywarren composting site near Basingstoke.

This was a tour organised by the city council and by Veolia who have a long term waste disposal contract (called Project Integra) with all the local authorities in Hampshire. I had been looking forward to it for some time and it was extremely educational.

The first thing I wanted to know was why does the Marchwood incinerator look like the lair of a James Bond villain and what does it look like inside. Here are pictures showing both.

I was told that essentially it looks like it does because the site available was quite large leaving the architect the luxury of building something unique and interesting. Inside it is essentially what you would imagine such a facility to look like.

Marchwood incinerator is one of the sites where our non recyclable waste goes to be burnt. It is then converted into energy and supplied into the national grid, powering about 20,000 homes locally. At the end of the incineration process what's left over (called bottom ash) is separated out into metal, aluminium and glass. Most of the bottom ash is then used as aggregate in road building.

We were shown a huge pit where the dustbin lorries dump all the waste. A giant crane then lifts heaps of the material and drops it into a chute for incineration. What amazed me was the amount of recyclable materials like cardboard that I could see. Clearly we have a lot further to go in sorting our rubbish. I was told that we could probably double the amount we recycle as a city if we all did it properly.

However we are making great strides. In 2002 local councils in Hampshire were sending 700,000 tonnes of waste to landfill. This was down to 123,000 in 2006 and I am sure we can reduce this much more in years to come.

The Integra project in Hampshire is leading the way and other counties are looking at similar models. What I find worrying however is how far the commercial sector is lagging behind. Business in Hampshire is land filling perhaps 5 times more than is coming from households. Changing that has to be the next big challenge. I see no reason why local authorities can't enter into agreements with the commercial sector to recycle and incinerate their waste and avoid it going to landfill.

Yesterday Southampton Conservatives released details of budget proposals for the city council for the coming year.

• An extra £745k pa for road repairs
• An extra £1.2m pa for adult care
• Extra money supporting children in care and to support foster carers
• Extra local money to support people with alcohol problems
• Additional funds to support more sport in schools
• More support to residents' associations
• A range of measures to improve the local environment, recycling and energy efficiency
• More money to reduce youth offending in the city

Tomorrow Southampton Councillors will be debating the Conservative proposal a for pensioner council tax discount.

I was interested to read that a similar battle of ideas has just taken place in Lincoln where the Conservative run council, in the teeth of Labour opposition, has won approval for a similar scheme. Click HERE to read the story in the Lincolnshire Echo. In Lincoln Labour were pushing more more taxation and more means testing. I am feeling a strong sense of deja vu!

Later this week safety measures should be introduced around Springhill School on Hill Lane/Milton Road.

Weather permitting, the council's contractor is planning to install a replacement guardrail at the western gate on Wednesday of this week. Bollards will also be installed.

This action follows pressure by the new Conservative Council.

For many years local residents have been complaining to me that its difficult to safety cross Hill Lane at the junction of Raymond Road. The entrance to Common makes it a popular place for people to want to cross and it is particularly difficult for parents with push chairs.

Now we have a Conservative run council action is finally being taken.

In the past proposals were brought forward for yet another set of traffic lights but I for one was very uncomfortable with this as I felt that it would mean more congestion and pollution on Hill Lane and more use of roads like Greville, Thornbury and Atherley as rat runs at rush hour.

Proposals have now been drawn up for a Toucan crossing.

In order to hear the views of local people a meeting is to be held in the St.John’s Centre in Raymond Road on Wednesday 23rd January 2008, between the hours of 2pm and 7:30pm.

Officers of the council will be there to answer your questions on the proposals.

The proposals being put forward are to provide a formal pedestrian and cycle crossing on Hill Lane just to the north of Raymond Road where the existing central island is located.

The reason for this proposal is to provide an improved crossing facility as well as linking the Cemetery Road cycle link to Raymond Road.

Additional features to be included are; the provision of a pedestrian refuge in Raymond Road and the widening of the footway in Hill Lane outside properties 184b, 186 and 188. The footway widening is to allow the ‘Give Way’ line in Raymond Road to be moved forward into Hill lane to improve the sight line for vehicles exiting Raymond Road.

I am hoping to be at the meeting in the evening after work so I can have chance to speak to people and gauge views on the proposals.

UPDATE 14/01/08: The meeting has now been changed to Wednesday 23rd January 2008.

No Waiting at Any Time restrictions have now been put in place with the painting of yellow lines at the junctions in Darwin Road.

The Thornbury Road / Darwin Road junction in particular has been a danger spot with the lack of vision afforded to drivers due to the parked cars at this junction.

I along with Councillors Michael Ball and Brian Parnell have supported Southampton City Councils’ implementation of parking restrictions.

We hope that this should limit the number of road traffic accidents in this area and improve pedestrian safety.

We have also asked that the parking enforcement officers be vigilant with extra enforcement activity in the early weeks of the introduction of this scheme to help reinforce this measure with drivers.

Conservatives have pledged extra funds to protect concessionary bus users in Southampton.

Under the Government’s national scheme concessionary bus users would find themselves barred from using their concessions before 9.30 in the morning. The Conservative Administration felt that this would unfairly penalise bus users who needed to get to hospital or other appointments before 9.30.

We are determined that local bus users don’t lose out because the Government are short changing the city.

Funds will be set aside to pay for an additional concessionary bus travel within Southampton's boundaries. This will include:

- Travel for Southampton pensioners between 9am and midnight within Southampton’s boundaries.
- Travel for all disabled people within the city boundaries including those who miss out under the government’s criteria for the national scheme. This includes all people on Disability Living Allowance (DLA)
- Companion passes to allow family members and carers to travel for free when accompanying disabled bus users.

The decision follows extensive consultation over recent months on the Conservative’s draft budget proposals for next year.

We have shown over many years that we are leading the way on public transport. We are the only Party who are willing and able to deliver a fair deal for Concessionary bus users. The Conservatives called for free travel for pensioners as far back as 2002.