Weekly digest: May 13th

Hello everyone

A couple of days late this week; no real reason apart from being a tad busy in the garden the last couple of days. But I promised a shorter edition this week to make up for last week’s protracted report. This week I’ve spent time summarising the final elements of the consultation we undertook back in February ….

1. Consultation feedback: flip chart summary: background/brief recap

• You’ll recall that our community consultation comprised 2 strands: an online (and physical) survey asking for your views – from strongly agree to strongly disagree – against a series of statements about our Area
• We had almost 180 responses to that survey and I published the results a few weeks ago at the end of March. In case you’ve mislaid the report here’s another link, so you can have a look at the top priorities
• However, as well as the survey we also gathered views on a series of flip charts posted up at each of the 4 consultation events we held – at the Village (AGM) and subsequently at Chilwell, Toton, and back at the Village for a 2^nd event
• There were 4 main flip charts headed up to stimulate ideas:
  • ‘What do you love about where you live?’
  • ‘What don’t you like about where you live?’
  • ‘What would you change about this place?’
  • ‘Do you have ideas for making this place even better?’

2. Consultation feedback: flip chart summary: the results

• In total, 214 thoughts/ideas were captured on these flips. Some of the thoughts were duplicates in that if someone agreed with a previously captured comment, they merely placed a tick next to it to indicate endorsement.
• Despite some duplication we had a terrific range of thoughts and suggestions. To make sense of it all, I categorised the comments into 7 broad themes:
  • Transport/Infrastructure (with 72 comments)
  • Sense of Community (46 comments)
  • Personal wellbeing (34 comments)
  • Greenspace (29 comments
  • Housing (21 comments)
  • Retail/Other (12 & 8 respectively)
• The eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted that the comments in total come to 222. That is because a few applied across more than 1 theme e.g. ‘install power points to charge electric cars’ applies equally to new housing as well as retail areas/car parks
• As you can see Transport/Infrastructure topped the list. There were 13 comments liking/praising the good transport connections & links to Nott’m/Derby/M1 etc as well as access to Attenborough station for rail connections and good ‘bus & tram service’
  However there were 34 comments disliking the current state of ‘traffic’, ‘congestion’, ‘speed bumps’, ‘poor public transport’.
• When it came to Sense of Community, the main comments centred around the lack of a ‘community focal point’, ‘misses a village hall/community centre’.
• The main themes that have emerged will clearly play a key role in determining the main objectives for our Plan. We always knew (or at least strongly suspected) that transport/infrastructure would be a dominant theme in the Plan along with Greenspace/environment. But I was tad – albeit pleasantly – surprised to see the depth of feeling on the lack of a heart/centre for the area.
• I’ll produce a summary file of all the comments along, so you can review and let me know if I’ve missed a key theme.

3. And finally……

• The SG held a very useful meeting last week. We agreed the objectives and main activities (to raise funds for the Forum) of the CIC we’re are creating. We will now complete the application forms and send them off in the next week or two.
• Good progress was reported across all fronts in developing our Neighbourhood Plan. The Housing strand have a draft proposal in place that only needs a little more polishing before it is ready for peer review by the rest of the SG. And some of the other groups aren’t far behind.
• I’m afraid we have little to report regarding the DIO plans to restore the memorial. Despite pressing them for a response we’ve been effectively stonewalled by being told the matter now rests with the DIO parliamentary team who will decide when and who will receive the update. We’ve briefed Anna Soubry about this development and so for the moment we are all waiting their plans. Not at all a satisfactory situation….

That’s all for this week folks. See you next week – back at normal publication time as well!

Kind regards
Graham