Roger Gambba-Jones

A quick glance behind the front page headline in todays Spalding Guardian (the web site to be specific) soon reveals what a distorted picture the Local Futures report gives.   This desktop exercise, by this ‘London bound' consultancy, used many sources of information to build up this lopsided report and failed to factor in probably the two most crucial issues, namely population and area covered, both of which give a population sparsity figure.  South Holland is one of the most sparsely populated districts in England, just over one person per hectare.   

Below are population figures for the three top scorers and for five of the bottom ones.

Notice that, apart from being in London - what a surprise! - all the best scorers are at least twice the population size of South Holland.  Also Westminster is about 4 sq miles in total, as is probably Kensington and Chelsea, compared to South Holland's nearly 300 sq miles.   I could go on to cite the number of events that take place at the South Holland Centre and how much entertainment is organised during the summer, especially for our young people. 

I could also go on to highlight the excellent work of our Economic Development team and the pro-active encouragement and support they offer to all those wishing to invest in South Holland - not just my opinion, but views expressed by both new and prospective businesses. 

To be absolutely fair to these London based wiz kids, their report does offer some good points for South Holland in respect of quality of life issues.  See the extract below. 

"At the other end of the table South Holland, in the East Midlands, takes the bottom spot, with low scores on all the composite parts of the amenities index. However, South Holland is a rural area and as such will inevitably have poorer access to these kinds of amenities. This is not to say that this and similar area do not offer a good quality of life. South Holland has an excellent natural environment which, to many people (whether they are looking for somewhere to live or somewhere to visit) is far more important than access to museums and libraries. Also, and importantly, a low score on the amenities index does not mean that an area cannot use culture to achieve its objectives."

Can anybody expalin to me what on earth the last sentence means?  Especially when you look at our particular set of priorities!

Both the links below lead to the articles that the newspaper report appears to be based on, so please have a look and make up your own mind on the merits of this report.

http://www.localfutures.com/Assets/1590/local%20amenties20barometer.pdf

http://www.localfutures.com/Standalone/Local_Futures_News_Barometer_July_2008/default.aspx#1897

Bottom line is that as usual, there are lies, damned lies and statistics! 

How sad that such cobblers gets to see the light of day, let alone become a front page headline story in our local newspaper!

In a similar vein, another story on the same page as the one above, suggested that some people think their ambitions should be allowed to over ride our planning policies.  Do it properly and you will get all the encouragement and support we can muster.  Try to work around us by whipping up local and often poorly informed support and it is hardly surprising that we will be both cautious and wary of your motives.

For those of you who might be interested, I'm now attempting to get back to some sort of normality following my Prostate cancer surgery.  Although it's still early days and all that and recovery was delayed by the dreaded hospital aquired infection (although not MRSA or CDIF thank the Lord) I'm on the mend.  If anybody wants to discuss the issue of Prostate cancer with me, or wants to know what the expereince has been like so far, please feel free to get in touch any time.  You can use  email2roger@fsmail.net .  Other contact details are also on the SHDC website.

The demise of the ICELE and the subsequent loss of this blogging site seems to be yet another example of government's impatience with anything that doesn't produce instant results.  Having had a really good idea - a web based resource for promoting democracy through the use of technology - they've decided to pull the plug because it has taken the world by storm.

How sad that they cannot accept that it takes time for people to get to grips with new ways of doing things and that very little worth having happens overnight.

I sincerely hope that between now and final switch off in September a way can be found to at least keep this blogging facility going and some effort is put in to helping councils understand how to sell this to its elected members.  I wonder how keen the minister would be to close this part of the ICELE site down if thousands of elected members were signed up, as opposed to few dozen we currently have? Perhaps we should be encouraging our colleagues to sign- up before it is too late, in order to give the minister a reason to revisit his decision?