A Missed Opportunity For Hadleigh

Hadleigh has been my local town for almost 12 years. During the 4 years that I spent as a Babergh District Councillor I frequently expressed concern about the absence of any visionary plans to protect and grow the town. In Babergh Council business terms, Hadleigh always played second fiddle to Sudbury, and the bungled attempts to merge Babergh and Mid Suffolk, combined with the dubious value for money business case to support the move of both Councils to Endeavour House in Ipswich, left little time for deliberations about the developing of Hadleigh.

When I lost my District Council seat in 2019, I was consoled by a verbal assurance that John Ward gave me to the effect that the new Administration would look at developing a visionary long-term plan for Hadleigh as a priority. Indeed, he followed this through by appointing a Cabinet Member to manage the task. Since then, however, I have become increasingly concerned about the absence of any meaningful progress to deliver a vision of any sort. There's no shortage of well-meaning individuals, each with his or her view on how we should take it forward, but we are totally lacking any meaningful coordinated action.

When I was offered the opportunity to stand as the County Councillor for Hadleigh Division in the 2021 local elections, I saw it as an opportunity to become involved in a drive to develop a strategic plan for the medium and long term development of the town. I have always believed that the County should lead this challenge because of the significant infrastructure costs that it would incur – well beyond the resources of Babergh District or the Town Councils. What we needed was to avoid were sticking plaster short term solutions that were implemented without meaningful consultation and universally unpopular – the Covid-19 High Street barriers being just one example of "how not to do it".

From my perspective, this has been made worse by the decision to bring in car parking charges in Babergh "not earlier than October 2021," which is another example of Babergh's complete failure to engage with key stakeholders – the retailers, the shoppers, the Chamber of Commerce and even the Hadleigh County, District and Town Councillors, before deciding the way forward. In that context, I can do no better than quote an extract from Mr Laing, a local resident, who submitted a petition to Babergh DC which stated that:

 "From the statutory guidance for Local Authorities on Enforcing Parking restrictions, the Secretary of State recommends that enforcement authorities, should consult locally on their parking policies when they appraise them, they should seek the views of people and businesses with a range of different parking needs, including the views of the police. The appraisal should take account of the impact on the local economy and the viability of local shops and high streets. To my knowledge none of this has happened."

I do not necessarily disagree with the need to implement car parking charges at some point – or at least make them cost neutral. However, to submit (or even discuss) a plan for car parking charges during a  Tier 5 lockdown, and when the retail and hospitality sectors are struggling to remain in business, was short sighted and irresponsible. I believe that the Babergh DC Cabinet has failed to take on board unique unprecedented challenges that we face post Covid-19 when we will need to find incentives to support the recovery and growth of the retail sector. Instead, it has created a disincentive to recovery by allowing the historically small cost of car parking subsidies to disproportionally dominate the agenda. In the case of Hadleigh, it is a cost that could easily have been absorbed in the overall council budget for 2021/22, especially as Babergh has declared a budget surplus in excess of £1 million for the current financial year.

In the current situation, the car parking charges proposal should never have been allowed to proceed when it was drafted by Officers. All I hear from John Ward and the Cabinet is that there is no evidence to show that parking charges lead to reduced footfall, an assertion that completely fails to acknowledge the unique and unprecedented challenges that we face in recovering from this pandemic. I noted with interest that the first pillar of the County Council's recovery plan states the need to strengthen our local economy. I could not agree more.

The decision to introduce car parking charges during a lockdown has all the hallmarks of an inexperienced Cabinet that did not probe the weaknesses of the draft paper and the failure to consult with any Hadleigh stakeholders before the draft was sent for full Council approval. The Officers' paper, endorsed and recommended by the Cabinet Member for the Environmemt, is shallow and based on questionable assumptions about traffic patterns and car utilisation. Most bizarrely of all, the paper was drafted pre-pandemic and fails to acknowledge in any meaningful way the unique and unprecedented challenges that we face to recover from Covid-19.  Had it done so, I believe that the implementation of car parking charges would have been delayed by a year, with the cost being easily absorbed into the General Fund underspend. This would have demonstrated positive support for the High Street and allowed Babergh time to conduct a meaningful strategic review of traffic and parking in the town.

As an aside, to justify the introduction of parking charges this year on Environmental Grounds is quite frankly a disingenuous red herring. In the longer term there is a clear requirement to reduce traffic congestion and to improve air quality by increased provision of Electric Vehicle charging points but this should be addressed as part of the strategic review.

When I was interviewed as a potential Conservative County Council candidate, I was quite reasonably asked if the Party could be confident of my support in light of my having left the Babergh Conservative Group for part of 2018. I unreservedly gave that assurance in good faith based on the assumption that key County matters would be debated by all interested parties and, in the case of Hadleigh, that a long-term strategic review would be completed by Babergh DC to consider Hadleigh's issues before any decisions were taken.

Unfortunately, since I gave that assurance, Babergh has decided to bring in car parking charges, despite having failed to consult with key interested parties before taking that decision. In addition I am concerned that the Babergh DC led strategic review for the long term development of Hadleigh will be no more than an exercise in delivering the easy (and inconsequential) options that do little to develop a long-term strategy for growth. In doing so, and in the unbelievable absence of a Neighbourhood Plan for Hadleigh, it will become a missed opportunity to consider the big picture issues of growth that will impact on housing, infrastructure, retail requirements, traffic flow, Benton Street, parking for all, residents' parking permits, bus services, opportunities café culture, tourism, finance etc.

In light of these real concerns, I became increasingly aware that if I were fortunate enough to be elected as the County Councillor for Hadleigh Division, I could well end up in another confrontation with John Ward, the Leader of the District Council, over our differing perceptions of how a strategic visionary review should address Hadleigh's future needs. That would not be in the best interests of either the County Council or the District Council, and past experience shows that Opposition Members would relish the opportunity to highlight the dispute.

For reasons outlined in this note, I advised my agent in February 2021 that I had decided withdraw my name from the candidates list for the Suffolk County Council (Hadleigh) Division in 2021.