SusanGaszczak

Speaking as a parent this is always a difficult subject. You want your children to be safe on the internet, allow them to learn, get them to avoid Facebook, My Space, Bebo and a host of other social Networking sites until we as parents, and it is a very individual thing, feel they are old enough.

Regardless of begging I have not allowed my elder children on any of the named sites; I feel that at 12 and almost 11 they are not old enough. They are well ‘trained' on most occasions and tell me which sites they are joining. Only on one occasion so far have I discovered that they have joined a site that was not appropriate.

When they came to me and explained they wanted to join a site recently I was happy. This site allowed them to create an ‘avatar', have a guest book and chat with friends. The site has a policy of registering a parent's email address if you are under 13. They both registered me and I was given a link to disable their accounts. I was happy, they were chatting with their step sister and each other.

Being a vigilant parent I know their email addresses and often log in as them to check their status and make sure they are safe. So far, so good. Then, my children decided to upgrade their accounts - it was during the holidays, we had rain, we had snow and they were bored. The cost was a fiver each for the month; for this they could get the chance of an extra room, to set up clubs and have regular weekly spending .money' to buy things for their room.

I checked the advice of the site concerned and it put the responsibility on the parents to ensure they were safe.

It was only when I got the receipt that I discovered my credit card would be charged every 30 days until I cancelled. I had said they could have one month only, only now I need to remember to cancel it in about 10 days time.

My eldest also started telling me about the strangers that were asking to be their friends. I then started to look closer at the site and realised that actually it was no different than Facebook. It is just a register of children. It says it is monitored, part of kidsafe and children under 13 can only communicate with friends, but anyone can add a friend and accept.

This requires parental supervision. However I would only be able to supervise if my children communicate their password. I know my children's but how many other parents do?

Whilst there is a need for safe networking for children, and this site has given extreme pleasure on rainy days to mine, there is also maybe a need for children under 13 to have their parents activate their accounts, be given their passwords and be notified of the friends their children are adding.

I have not named the site as I know they are not the only site to use practises such as this, barely scraping through the guidelines.

Having spent yesterday in Stevenage, working a District and a County by election, I have to ask the value of polling stations, and especially the number we have in each ward.

Stevenage Borough Council, in its last review of polling districts, had recommended 3 polling stations per ward. In practice, therefore, we had situations where there were two polling stations within a few hundred yards of each other in the same street.

Normally, with a brisk turn out, you would expect a steady stream of people coming through the doors. However, I don't think Stevenage BC took the postal vote options into consideration - around a third of the 7000 electors had postal votes and they did vote! Before the polling stations had opened the turn out for the whole election was 25%. I went on a tour of the polling stations at lunch time to find out what the turnout was like; I visited all six polling stations - at one they had issued just FOUR ballot papers in 6 hours.

The final turn out on of people voting on the day was just 4%. That's 280 votes in total, 46 per polling station, 23 per member of staff manning the polling station, 19 votes an hour. The most telling statistic - ONE SIXTH of the turnout actually voted in person.

Is this really value for money? Or should we be looking at amalgamating polling stations in dense areas?

It is not often I feel the need to blog about local politics in people terms but I really must applaud local district and county councillor Peter Hand.

Today the local paper Bedfordshire on Sunday has reported that he will be challenging the County Council leadership. The Chief Exec has already resigned, good luck to her, she fought her fight and has moved on. The Leader however is still in place and has gone on record to say that she cannot accept government's decision is final. Is this a good way to deliver the two unitary decision?

Whilst my politics are very different to Peter's, I appreciate his want and need to represent the tax payer. When we as a political group challenged the Judicial Review I knew Peter's views were not dissimilar to mine. He saw our view - political decisions made by politicians tend to stand; after all who runs the country? The Judiciary? The Politicians? The latter I believe, the former tend to uphold the agenda or laws the politicians set. Any amount of money thrown at lawyers tends to only benefit the lawyer in cases like this.

Tomorrow Peter will hand in his nomination papers and I wish him luck. Any fellow councillor of mine, before you vote think about what needs to be delivered and how a change in leader may help that delivery. After all we were elected to represent people and make sure their tax delivers value for money. Are you currently succeeding in that? If you can answer yes I will be surprised.

My usual morning routine had me choking on my coffee this morning. The children had made me coffee and I sat down to catch up with what had happened over night. I almost choked on my coffee as I saw the lead story on the BBC site.

My normal reaction to anything involving the Queen is to totally switch off. Not this time! Some bright spark has suggested that children should say an oath to become less of a problem! That will never solve the problem of the way society has changed.

I often have conversations with neighbours and friends as to why I feel society has changed and how we are now in the situation that we have people scared of teenagers. How we got to this situation almost seems unimportant though trying to find a sensible solution is the key issue.

I recently attended a Youth Conference. The 100 teenagers present all split off into groups and then had to present to the adults their ideas and solutions to te problem of 'Youth'. I had three groups present their ideas to me. Two of the groups wanted ‘Youth Houses'. This idea is based on the many empty homes and buildings there are scattered around the UK. In this house they wanted access to somewhere to chill out and drink coffee, a study room, information on courses/jobs/entertainment and access to an adult who was not a parent.

The third group talked about transport. They wanted conductors back on buses, buses that ran at night and cheaper travel. The most interesting thing I thought was the conductor; when questioned further they said that they wanted to feel safe but also wanted not to feel like they were intimidating other bus users.

Swearing an oath to the Queen never came up and I suspect never would.