READERS' VIEWS 19/3

24 March 2009

Don't drive people away

IT IS disappointing that Rugby Borough Council believes raising parking fees will substantially increase its income - Observer, January 29.
This is not the way to encourage people to visit the town centre; having shops and facilities that people want to use in a pleasant and safe environment is surely the way to attract more custom.
Raising parking fees will discourage visitors, thereby further reducing income. It will also penalise those people who must travel to work in the town centre by car and who can ill afford another increase in their daily expenditure.
Rugby town centre now consists mainly of empty buildings and charity shops, interspersed with a couple of coffee houses where we can sit and ponder on why we came into town at all.
The Local Government Association (LGA) says four out of five councils have reported an increase in empty premises, and Rugby is obviously leading the way. But why does Robin Richter - Observer, January 22 - believe that another Tesco occupying the vacant Woolworths building will revitalise the town?
Surely Rugby already has enough supermarkets catering for the lower end of the market. There are Aldi, Netto, Lidl, and Tesco already, with ASDA also on its way. There is a number of flourishing businesses providing independent goods and services, but in order to find quality food, for example, it is necessary to travel out of the town to one of a number of farm shops, and the nearest Waitrose is in Daventry where, incidentally, parking is free and very much in demand.
Surely the Woolworths' building would provide an excellent site for an indoor market for independent traders rather than another faceless multinational.
By pursuing a policy over many years of discouraging small independent businesses through high rates and favouring large multinational corporations the town has become identical to many other anonymous towns with no identity of its own. Compensating for budget deficits by increases in Council Tax and cutting back on services such as libraries and public lavatories projects a very negative image.
The doom and gloom merchants who predict years of recession are creating a self fulfilling prophecy. What is needed is an arena of optimism to enable entrepreneurship and growth where creativity can flourish.
The way to regenerate a dying town is to encourage small businesses with incentives and build confidence for people to take a risk and seek premises in the town, to build a town with character that people want to visit, then increases in income from parking fees and better use of public transport will come about by default.
Paul Jennings, Via email

Police are not helping

LAST Monday morning as i approached my company's warehouse I noticed a large hole had been cut into our fence and the 10ft metal security gates at the end of our drive had been ripped clean off the steel girders holding them in place.
Lying in our yard was a four wheeled trolley, an immersion tank and a 8ft metal building acro. It turned out that the thieves had forced their way on to our premises to access and rob an adjoining company.
I called the police and explained what I had happened and was told that they would come and have a look and was given a crime number. It was three days until police visited and I’ve had to pay hundreds of pounds to have my gates and fence repaired.
What sort of signal does this send out to businesses when the police can’t even be bothered to visit the scene of a serious crime? Perhaps this explains why our business insurances are rocketing, the police are doing absolutely nothing to investigate cases like this and try and take the criminals off the street. In the mean time business are losing thousands and the police are spending our tax money putting an officer with speed camera at the bottom of Vicarage Hill catching the real hard nose criminals who may be exceeding the speed limit.
Please feel free to rob us as we can promise the police won’t stand in your way!
Name and address supplied

Roundabout cannot cope

MR WAINRIGHT uses the words ".... the whole point of roundabouts is to keep traffic moving ..." - Observer letters, last week.
These words elegantly express the brutal pedestrian hostility of all busy roundabouts, which in this century is no longer acceptable.
The Corporation Street/Newbold Road roundabout is probably often pressed beyond its effective capacity and the whole roundabout would benefit from traffic light control. However, if this is not going to be done, the pedestrian crossing on Newbold Road, to which he objects, had better stay. To do neither is not an option.
Mr Wainwright's proposal for a light controlled crossing near the Newbold Road/Wood Street junction deserves support.
Mike Avis, Tennyson Avenue, Rugby

I do know my facts

MR WAINRIGHT claims that my letter regarding the new crossing on Newbold Road was "pathetic and ridiculous" and that I made several baseless references to "ignorant drivers" and "that the least I could do is to ensure that what I say has some basis in fact" - Observer letters, last week.
Well, I would like to say that I have lived less than 20 yards from the island on Newbold Road for nearly four years which is way before the new crossing was even thought of. The volume of traffic has always blocked the island and clogged up Corporation Street and the Volume of cars and lorries has always caused the traffic on Oliver Street to back log. This is not a new event that has suddenly been caused by the council building this new crossing, and if Mr Wainright thinks otherwise then could I ask how long he has lived in Rugby?
Mr Wainright appears to think the new relief road is a total waste of money and will do nothing to lighten the amount of traffic that uses the roads through the Rugby town centre, and that the building of the new Asda will infact dramatically increase the traffic. Wake up and smell the coffee Mr Wainright, the amount of cars and lorries the new Asda will bring into the town will be a quarter of what the relief road will take away.
Mr Wainright wants facts about ignorant drivers so then I will give him a few.
Every Saturday my wife and I had to run the gauntlet, trying to cross Newbold Road to go shopping in town, 30 maybe 40 cars would go by until a thoughtful driver would hold the traffic on the island to let us cross.
If you are able to make the walk from Tesco on Leicester Road to the Benn Hall on Newbold Road on a Saturday morning I will guarantee that you can count between 10 to 15 drivers who drive whilst using a mobile phone, I have actually witnessed a driver using his elbow to steer round the island because he had a mobile phone in one hand and was changing gear with his other. The driver in question was driving a 40ft lorry. if thats not ignorance then I don't know what is?
Every morning I drive to the top of St John Street on my way to work and have to sit for at least 10 minutes before a driver will flash to let me out and this is at 6.30am.
Everyone calls the motorway junction at Cathorpe a killer junction, but they are wrong - the junction doesn't kill people, people kill people.
Mr Wainright, please don't tell me I haven't a clue how the roads block up because I do, but I cant believe you blame the new crossing for it?
Dean Marsden, Via email

Budget has no answers

I WAS surprised that Coun David Cranham asserts that the Conservative leadership of the council have kept Rugby's share of Council Tax to a minimum - Observer letters, last week.
How interesting that the Tory leader Coun Craig Humphrey hides behind one of his minions when it comes to commenting on his administration's utterly disastrous budget.
I can understand his embarrassment - this budget cuts services, makes staff redundant, fails to make provision for adequate housing and hits tax payers just when they can ill-afford it in some of the most trying economic times in living memory.
As for the suggestion that the council could not have gone for a zero tax increase as proposed by Labour it is an utter falsehood. This administration set on a course of undermining council services and the financial position of the borough many years ago and now the chickens are coming home to roost - and just at the wrong time!
It is one thing to table a completely damaging budget, it is another to treat the people of Rugby like fools. If the Tories had one iota of decency they would apologise for getting the council into a position where it was incapable of helping people at a time of acute economic need. They would also apologise for falsely claiming that a zero tax increase, as proposed by Labour, was not an option.
Coun Jim Shera, Leader of Rugby Borough Council's Labour group

Writer needs to apologise

EVEN though I was tempted to ignore Peter Laurence’s letter – Observer last week - I feel compelled to respond for the sake of readers who might have been seduced by this defamatory diatribe. Not only is the letter offensive but it is totally inaccurate in its contents.
I have never promoted a blanket banning of alcohol in Dunchurch. The idea was to ban alcohol only in outdoor public areas; it was not my original idea, but it was supported by many residents and traders who because of alcohol induced anti-social behaviour had experienced the damage caused to public and personal possessions, and the disruption to commercial business, and personal well-being.
The aim was not to deprive anyone of the enjoyment of responsible consumption of alcohol but to remove the element of doubt faced by the police in deciding whether to take action in the face of alcohol induced problems.
The preferred order would have created alcohol-free zones so that a person’s age would be irrelevant; anyone, of any age, who violated the order could expect appropriate action to be taken.
I have never publicly stated that I am determined to have CCTV installed in Dunchurch, although there has been considerable pressure from within the village to do so. A responsible parish council, faced with this request and a high level of anti-social behaviour and crime, would be failing in its duty if it did not investigate the possibility. My own stance is to be sceptical about CCTV’s benefits, a view shared by many members of the police and certainly some of my fellow councillors. This has led to the preferred approach, a trial evaluation which is being actively pursued by the parish council.
The council cannot spend large sums of public money without due diligence; were it to do so it would be rightly pilloried.
As regards contacts with the police, the parish council and its clerk have extremely good contacts with them. Our relationship now extends to a partnership that allows the Safer Neighbourhood Team to share the facilities of the new parish council office in the village centre.
We welcome the participation of a police representative, usually our PCSO, at the monthly PC meetings. The clerk and I always attend the Locality Panel meetings where we participate fully.
However these are totally public meetings and there is a limit to what might be acceptably discussed in an open forum.
The meeting to which I referred in the parish council’s press release, printed as a letter on March 5, was always intended to involve the borough council as well as the police and to discuss matters that would be considered as too confidential for an open forum.
As for the Gunpowder Plot. I have never ever denied the historical link with Dunchurch. My only wish in writing to the newspapers concerning the naming of the Parker-Lake development was to preserve the integrity of the history. My letter at the time read: “I have no problem with Parker-Lake commemorating the Gun-powder Plot and I support their use of conspirators’ names in parts of the development”. I went on to say “the events are amply documented in the official records of the time”.
I fail to see how this can be interpreted by Mr Laurence that I called it a “tenuous connection” or that I ever recommended that we should “forget about it” because I “wasn’t happy”. The fact remains that the chosen name of Guy’s Common, inferring an ownership, may be totally misinterpreted by the public, many of whom are likely to be unaware of the details of the plot.
I consider other statements in Mr Laurence’s letter to be outrageous and libellous and demand a public apology without delay. I shall not be satisfied until there is a formal published retraction. If he wishes to reinforce that apology in person then I invite him to do so; as chairman of Dunchurch Parish Council I can be easily contacted.
Robin Aird, The Heath, Dunchurch

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