Mary Reid

This good news was given in the answer to a Parliamentary Question asked by Edward Davey MP.

Mr Davey: To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government what budget her department has allocated to the ReadMyDay/BloginaBox platform for each of the next three financial years, and if she will make a statement.

Mr Dhanda: The Department has agreed to provide funding of £10,590 to provide the required resources for the ReadMyDay/BloginaBox platform to operate until October 2011.

The Department will be communicating with all users on the platform to inform them of the decision and to encourage the establishment of a user group to seek how the platform can be made sustainable beyond this date. It is hoped that this seed funding will provide the opportunity for users to take control of this important asset and secure its future for them and other civic leaders.

Parmjit Dhanda MP is a Minister in the Department of Communities and Local Government.

Whew - what a relief!

The reference to users taking control is rather attractive, but I do know that CLG is also open to proposals from local authorities and other bodies who might be interested in taking it on - now with guaranteed funding for the first three years.

I've just learnt, courtesy of the MKNE blog, that one of my political heroes was a codebreaker at Bletchley Park.

Roy Jenkins was a former Labour Home Secretary. He was one of the Gang of Four who founded the Social Democrat Party, which ultimately joined the Liberals to form the Liberal Democrats.

And - amazingly - he was at Bletchley Park during the war, giving even more strength to the campaign to save it for the nation.

I met Dr Sue Black for the first time on Tuesday. She lives in Surbiton and is Head of Information and Software Systems at the University of Westminster.

Then on Thursday she hit the headlines with her campaign to save Bletchley Park. In fact, a number of people have been trying to raise awareness of this for months now, but Sue united the concerns of 100 academics in a letter to the Times, which triggered much media interest.

Since then we've met up again and mulled over what can be done to protect this unique and very special place.

Bletchley Park played a unique role in British history, with two very different outcomes, both of world significance.

It was used during World War 2 as the headquarters for the codebreaking arm of military intelligence. The War Ministry drew together some of the finest mathematicians and electronics engineers of the time, of which the best known was Alan Turing. Many people claim that the Second World War would not have been won by the allies without the work done by his team in decrypting enemy Enigma messages; others claim that, at the least, it shortened the war by two years. After the war Bletchley Park was developed as GCHQ, before moving down to new premises in Cheltenham.

So its place in military history alone deserves attention.

But for me, the even greater significance of the place is that it was here that the modern digital computer was born. To be fair, the machines that Turing and his colleagues built to carry out the decryption at Bletchley Park weren't quite fully programmable electronic systems, but they were a massive step on the way, funded by the war effort. Very soon after the war the first proper computer was built by some of the same team at Manchester University.

What could be of greater significance to our 21st century world than the birth of the computer?

And yet, the huts where this seminal work was done are in danger of falling apart. The Park is run by a trust which receives no public funding at all and relies on personal donations.

I've been completely fascinated by Turing's visionary work, ever since I first came across some of his academic papers at University. I was lucky to be given a copy of one of the first books about modern computers, published in 1953, in which Turing wrote about the relevance of game theory, at a time when the machines could do little more than complex calculations. And more recently I managed to attend the annual Loebner Prize competition inspired by the Turing test of Artifical Intelligence.

It would unforgivable if the place in which he and his colleagues made such enormous differences to the world was neglected.

It should be given Government funding to restore all the original buildings and to turn them into a living museum. It is already a centre for educational visits and academic research - the trust has already set up the National Museum of Computing on the site - but it deserves a much more central place in our country's heritage.

Do sign the petition.

Footnote

I knew another woman in Surbiton, who died a few years ago, who served at Bletchley Park as a Wren. She was given top-secret instructions to make her way to Bletchley Station where she would be met by someone from Station X (as the place was known). No-on turned up to meet her, so she stood rather lost on the platform until one of the porters came up and said "Are you going to Station X, love? It's over there".

I've just got back from Development Control Committee, where I had to discipline myself to sit silently in the public gallery.

I'm pleased to report that the Committee agreed with South of the Borough Neighbourhood on three significant planning applications.

1. The Lidl application for 62-74 Leatherhead Road was refused planning permission - for lots of reasons. 

2. The redevelopment of the Red Lion in Ewell Road, to provide a pub, three shops, 14 houses and 47 flats, was also refused basically because it was trying to cram far too much onto the site. It also involved building several houses on a garden, which we are not happy about in these parts.

3. A hotel on the former petrol station site on Kingston Road near Tolworth Station. The outline application was agreed in principle but pending a report from Transport for London, which could change things. Even if that report supports the application the developer will still have to submit an application in the future for the actual design of the building.

For all the arguments about rubbish collections, one thing that all Kingston councillors, across the parties, now agree on is that bins and recycling boxes should not have microchips attached to them.

Now why on earth would anyone put a chip on a bin?

Well, where a Council does want to keep a record of who had put materials in a recycling bin, or how much landfill rubbish had gone into wheelie bin, then they do it with chips. As a bin is emptied, a microchip reader on the truck identifies which bin it is and who it belongs to (in much the same way as Oyster cards are read at the ticket barrier)

I repeat - this is NOT going to happen in Kingston.

The local Tories have been the loudest in condemning this intrusive process. So isn't it odd that George Osbourne, the Conservative Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, is advocating a scheme that can only work if chips are put into bins?

Osbourne proposes giving money to residents who recycle.  An interesting ploy, but the only way a Council would know which households had put out rubbish for recycling would be - you've got it - by reading chips in the bins.

(He also seems to have overlooked the fact that the scheme might actually encourage people to buy more goods in order to get their reward)

Want to know about my most embarrassing political moment (knickers come into it), or my earliest political memory (the Communist candidate won)..?

I was asked those and many other questions this week for the Daily Politico page on Total Politics

Could you play for ten hours?

Kingston Philharmonia will be attempting just that tomorrow as they tackle their 'Beet-o-thon'.

I'll be there for much of the time because they have chosen to support Young Kingston as one of their charities.

Everyone is welcome to drop in to hear them during the day - it's in Kingston Parish Church from 10am to 8pm. They will work their way through Symphonies 1 to 8, ending with the wonderful Violin Concerto.

If you can't get along you can sponsor the event here.

Just bear with me while I provide a little explanation to this.

• collect recyclable materials fortnightly and landfill waste weekly (the current system)
• collect recyclable materials weekly and landfill waste fortnightly (the new system from September)

The second option has been proved to dramatically increase recycling and substantially reduce the cost of sending rubbish to landfill - a cost that the government is deliberately increasing year on year.

The one option that everyone agrees is not available is to collect both recyclable materials and landfill waste every week - this would be far too costly.

Liberal Democrats are backing the new system. The Tories have just handed in a petition asking the Council to keep the current system.

With me so far?

Yesterday one of the Tory councillors, Cllr Ian George, signed the Lib Dem petition backing the new system.

I wonder if his leader knows........

There's a building with a real Wow! factor taking shape in the Neighbourhood. It's the first phase of the new school for Chessington Community College.

This afternoon I got a chance to look round. The pupils have been sent off on their holidays early this year so that the staff can move everything in place ready for the start of next term.

And it is stunning. In fact, it looks more like a glossy commercial HQ than a school. It says so much about how we value our young people when we are able to provide them with such brilliant spaces.  

The astonishing thing is that the whole project has been completed to an impossible timescale - 2 years design and build. This is the only pathfinder project in England that is completing on time and on budget, so we should be very proud of what has been achieved.

Here are some photos - there are stacks of furniture around but you will get the idea.

You can see earlier photos of the site here.

Over 70 people from the Somerset Avenue area packed into the Community Hall at the Hook Centre this morning for the planning appeal hearing. 

A developer had put in two planning applications, both of which proposed demolishing 30 and 32 Somerset Avenue, then building either eight or seven houses on the site plus part of the back garden of no 28. Both applications had been refused by the Council but the developer had appealed against the decisions.

Perhaps unwisely, the developers had exercised their right to ask for a public hearing, rather than just leave it to the Planning Inspector. I think they had underestimated the local people and the level of objection.

The meeting started at 10am and finished with a site visit from 3pm onwards. We were all able to observe the cars struggling to pass each other around the first bend in Somerset Avenue - the thought of a new access road to a small housing development at this very point makes me shudder.

I, along with several others, spoke up firmly against the proposals, listing a whole range of reasons from traffic to flooding risk.

The Planning Inspector conducted the meeting in a calm and balanced way, so it was difficult to work out what his views might be. We will hear his judgement in about six weeks time.

I've just got in from Full Council, where there was unanimous support for this motion:

It is the Council's view that in principle we are opposed to development on garden land.

This means that there is a presumption against a speculative development that takes up garden space, and that any applicant who wanted to do so would have to provide justifications.

Note - technically this is not yet enshrined in the Local Development Framework, which is the formal set of planning policies of the Council. But this declaration puts us in a much stronger position to oppose inappropriate developments on gardens.

Should be useful ammunition at the Somerset Avenue appeal hearing tomorrow.

In case you've not noticed the banner on King Edwards Recreation Ground - next Saturday (19th) it will be transformed into a Family Fun Day and Market.

Surbiton Rotary are organising this for the Neighbourhood for the third year running, and each year it gets bigger.

Starting at 11am there will be a bouncy castle, animals, rides and stalls, plus a circus skils workshop, birds of prey and a junior football competition. Radio Jackie will bring their roadshow along for some great music and repartee. Should be fun.

This beautiful photo was taken over my shoulder at the first Fun Day in 2006.....

So many interesting things happening this week - and I've been pretty busy too - so I'm only now getting round to commenting on the decision of the Church of England to allow women to become bishops.

Technically, the Synod decided in principle on admitting women as bishops three years ago, but delayed implementing the decision. This has been a pretty frustrating time, both for women clergy and for many of us ordinary church members who find the inconsistency rather puzzling. But I do understand that, given the long history of the Church, a delay of a few years may be helpful if it leads to a strong decision.

In this case, it was very unfortunate that this important debate was overshadowed by the Jerusalem meeting which seems to be splitting the world wide Anglican communion on the issue of gay priests.

Back in England, women have been ordained as priests since 1994, so for many of us it was unthinkable that they could not be installed as bishops too.

The problem was not with church members but with some of the male clergy. Most church members, male and female, are perfectly happy with a woman vicar, though some may have taken time to get used to the idea.

Few church members are bothered by the rather flimsy theological arguments against ordaining women, since they seem to depend on a reading of scripture and contemporary texts that whitewashes out the female disciples of Jesus.

Many churches have now experienced the enrichment that the female voice has brought to our parishes. Some very able women have emerged and there is no shortage of possible candidates for future episcopal vacancies.

The male clergy who objected to women priests at the time they were first permitted were, of course, running their own parishes, so did not share the experience of being ministered to by a woman. But when they are faced with the prospect of a woman bishop as a senior to them, all the old prejudices emerged again. This time it's not the 'man in the pew' who has to think round the idea of having a woman in charge, but the 'man in the pulpit'.

I'm very pleased that Synod did not give in to those who wanted super bishops or an alternative diocese for those who cannot accept female bishops. It is important to support those who are unhappy with the decision, but a parallel system that denies the overall principle is too contradictory.

I look forward with some excitement to the installation of the first female bishop, which could happen as soon as next year.

Kingston and ICELE were both mentioned in the House of Commons yesterday.

Hazel Blears launched her White Paper on empowerment called "Communities in Control - Real People, Real Power". I haven't had a chance to do more than skim read it so far, and will comment on it in a day or two.

But Eric Pickles, the Conservative spokesperson on Communities and Local Government, linked it with withdrawal of funding to ICELE, whern he said:

The Right Honourable Lady calls for online petitions, but if she is such a supporter of e-democracy, why is her Department axing all funding for the International Centre of Excellence for Local eDemocracy? 

Does she not appreciate that the centre has been instrumental in helping local community groups and parish councils establish and publish community websites, and that it is the only organisation offering impartial advice?

Julia Goldsworthy, who is the Liberal Democrat spokesperson on Communities and Local Government, said this:

Can the Secretary of State confirm that many local councils, many of which are Liberal Democrat, are many steps ahead in this process?

For example, Newcastle is already undertaking participatory budgeting involving people as young as three. Kingston council has a petition power, whereby petitions lead to debates in the chamber. When will the Government make proposals to do the same in this place?

There was a good turnout at the South of the Borough Neighbourhood meeting last night for the discussions on some significant planning applications and on the new recycling and waste collections.

I'd be really interested to hear if anyone attended as a result of reading about it in my blog - do leave a comment or email me.

The new recycling and waste collections is being introduced from September onwards.  You can come and hear the latest plans and ask questions at the South of the Borough Neighbourhood Committee this Wednesday. It will meet in Southborough School and the discussion on this item will begin at 7.30pm.

Just to sum up, under the new system a large amount of materials will be collected each week from our homes including:

Food - cooked and uncooked (meat too)
Paper
Cardboard
Plastic bottles
Glass bottles and jars
Cans and tins
Textiles and shoes
Directories
Drinks cartons (including Tetra Pak)
Household batteries

Anything left over will be collected fortnightly. Most houses will be issued with wheelie bins, as well as green boxes and food waste containers. Blocks of flats will have their own arrangements.

Please sign the online petition to reconsider the withdrawal of funding from the ICELE.

At the South of the Borough Neighbourhood Committee we will be discussing four planning applications - do come along if you are interested in any of these. The meeting will start at 7pm at Southborough School (but you may want to arrive later - see below)

The very first item will be a planning application for ten houses to be built on 20 and 22 Kingsmead Avenue, plus some of the back gardens of 24-28. The usual planning rules apply to this item - members of the public can only speak if they have registered in advance, and speeches will be limited to 5 minutes for the applicant and 5 minutes (in total) for objectors.

The other three planning applications will all be consultations, so the restrictive planning rules do not apply, and anyone can speak, at the Chair's discretion. The Committee probably won't start discussing these until after 8.30pm, possibly 9pm. They are:

1. The Lidl application for 62-74 Leatherhead Road. This is the site of the former Fleetwood Fengate business , plus four semis next to it. The application is for a supermarket and 12 flats.

2. The redevelopment of the Red Lion in Ewell Road, to provide a pub, three shops, 14 houses and 47 flats.

3. A hotel on the former petrol station site on Kingston Road near Tolworth Station. This is an outline application, which means that it is asking for agreement in principle for permission to build a 5 storey hotel with 105 bedrooms. If that is granted then another application will have to be made for the actual design of the building.

These three applications will then go to Development Control Committee for the final decision.

The real test of devolution is how much local people, families and communities are empowered themselves.

Liberal Democrat councils are leading the way in changing this.

In Kingston, which has a population of over 150,000, any group of 100 people can call in any decision the council has made. And the opposition chairs the scrutiny panel - so this is no paper exercise in consultation.

In Hull, Liberal Democrats allowed public questions at cabinet meetings.

And in Cambridge, public contributions at planning committee, and questions at council meetings.

In Birmingham, Liberal Democrats in the administration have re-organised the council into ten 'constituencies' and given them £100m in service budgets and 2,500 staff directly responsible to each.

The 12 councillors representing each constituency have to meet in public, and to build links with the strategic partnerships and with key local agencies in each area. There are minimum standards for each service across the city, but they have wide powers to adapt services to local needs.

They're mirroring the model I've outlined for national government - limited central rules, with local diversity - at a smaller scale.

This was Nick Clegg speaking at the LOcal Government Association's Annual Conference yesterday in Bournemouth.

That bit he says about the other councils - all of them apply to Kingston as well (but we have to be magnanimous and share the glory...). Kingston pioneered devolution to Neighbourhoods, but it is rather exciting to see it replicated successfully in a major city like Birmingham.

It was a powerful speech, in which he articulated the Liberal Democrat principles around communities and empowerment, and how our interpretation of those terms differs from other political parties. Indeed, these concepts lie at the very heart of liberalism, and it is good to see them spelt out so clearly.

We have tried to give those principles concrete expression in Kingston. Here in the South of the Borough Neighbourhood we have taken seriously the "philosophy of decentralisation and local empowerment" which Clegg supports wholeheartedly.

You can read Nick Clegg's speech here.

There is a rather splendid clock tower in Surbiton, at one end of Claremont Gardens, near Waitrose.

Today Prince Edward joined local children (and a few grey heads) to celebrate its centenary and restoration.

Why was Prince Edward asked?

Well the clock was commissioned to commemorate the coronation of his namesake and great great (have I got that right?) grandfather King Edward VII.

Now you may have spotted that King Edward was crowned in 1902. Apparently, after a competition for a suitable memorial, building work finally started in 1905, finishing in 1908.  Things were evidently slower in those days.

The clock tower is built using beautiful Bath stone, which doesn't weather too well, so when it was examined in 2006 it was clearly going to be a costly job to restore it.

Surbiton Neighbourhood Committee decide to take on the project, and set up the Friends of Surbiton Clock Tower.

The main funding has come from English Heritage, Heritage for London, Waitrose and the Royal Borough, but many local traders and organisations have got behind the project as well.

So today was a real community celebration, and here are some more photos.

Children from local schools sang 'My grandfather's clock' and danced

Prince Edward chatting with Cllr Frances Moseley (co-Chair of the Neighbourhood), watched by Bruce Mcdonald (Chief Executive of the Borough) and Edward Davey MP

The plaque, now unveiled

ICELE has been closed down by Communities and Local Government. This means that the future of BloginaBox / ReadMyDay is very uncertain.

I have just written to the Minister, Parmjit Dhanda, about the future of this project that encourages councillors and council officers to blog. The blogging platform is an integral element, and it would be disastrous if it was lost.

Dear Minister

As Vice Chair of ICELE I met you with colleagues earlier in the year to discuss the future of ICELE.

However I am writing now as an enthusiastic user of the ReadMyDay/BloginaBox platform. I was a member of the first group to trial the system back in January 2005 when it was developed by the National Project for Local eDemocracy (which I chaired). Since then I have recruited many other councillors and council officers to use it.

My blog currently has a readership of around 10,000 visits per month. It has featured in the national press and in local government journals on a number of occasions. I have also been invited to speak about eDemocracy, on behalf of ICELE and the National Project, at around forty conferences and seminars in the UK and abroad. I normally promote ReadMyDay/BloginaBox amongst other eDemocracy tools at these events.

You will find over 1000 postings on my blog, including many photos. Together they contain an archive of local issues, as well as a complete record of my year as Mayor of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames.

In 2005 my blog was shortlisted for the New Statesman New Media award for a website by an elected representative.

In 2007 my blog won two awards at the Liberal Democrat Blog of the Year Awards - one for Best Blog from a Lib Dem Elected to Public Office, and one for Best Designed LibDem Blog.

In accepting those awards I paid tribute to ReadMyDay, the support given me by the project, and the flexible design options offered by the system. I felt honoured to be selected to receive these awards out of 250 or so Liberal Democrat bloggers.

In 2008 one of my blog postings was shortlisted for the Best Lib Dem Blog Post in the Gender Balance Blogging Awards.

Through all these awards the visibility of the brand has been heightened considerably.

In my view, it would be a disaster if the ReadMyDay/BloginaBox were to be abandoned, for a number of reasons:

1. As a user I would find it almost impossible to transfer the full content of the blog to another platform. I am not prepared to lose this public record.

2. Although some users have, like me, registered a domain name that points to the home of the blog, many others rely on the readmyday/myname format as their URL. If the platform is lost then their web addresses will become redundant and the whole content will be lost to the public.

3. Google and other search engines have indexed the blogs from the day each started, so if the platform is discontinued this wealth of archived material will be lost.

4. The potential damage to the reputation of CLG should be a serious concern of the Department, given that the users of the platform are all political activists.

So I do hope you will be able to find a way of sustaining the platform. We cannot afford to lose it.

With best wishes

Mary Reid

It seems Kingston has significantly fewer obese children and adults, teenage pregnancies, or binge drinking adults compared with the rest of England. Fewer women smoke in pregnancy and more breastfeed; more children are in good health; more adults eat healthily, fewer have diabetes, and there are fewer early deaths from smoking, heart disease, stroke and cancer.

All that makes Kingston a very healthy borough and a good place to live in.

But there are a couple of things that should prevent our local health bosses from being too complacent.

Oddly, given the good figures on obesity and health in children, the one (and only) score that was significantly worse than average, was for physically active children. This was measured by looking at the percentage of school children who spent at least 2 hours per week on PE and school sport in 2006-07.  Apparently many other authorities included activities during lunchbreaks, which Kingston ignored. In 2006-07 not all local schools had managed to reach the 2 hour target for curriculum PE/sport, but I'm told that all are doing so now.

The real challenge to emerge from the data is around deprivation. Generally speaking, deprivation has a marked impact on health, to the extent that men living in the least deprived areas can expect to live four years more than those in the most deprived areas.

Deprivation in families is often measured by eligibility for free school meals, and there is a worrying link here with ethnicity. In most ethnic groups, including White, the number of children eligible for free school meals hovers at around 10%; but for black children this rises to over 35%.

The Health Profile for the Borough has just been produced by the Dept of Health. You can download the full document here.