Sep 2007 03

Campaign news from Kent2

Burning_moneyOur New Romney organiser, Councillor Wendy Nevard, has been a real gem in our campaign to expose local government waste.  She bravely stood up to councillors and officers willing to waste £10,000 of taxpayers’ money on goalposts and has kept us busy with news of constant local government waste down in Kent.

The first story we’ve been fed comes from the Romney Marsh edition of the Folkestone Herald, it highlights a taxpayer’s revolt in Dymchurch Parish Council.  It appears that the council agreed to hire a consultant to examine the suitability of a car park that had already met the standards required to act as car park for a busy doctor’s surgery.  That’s £800 for a consultant to be paid by the taxpayer just to examine a surface that had already met national standards.  Thankfully parish councillors Joe Turner and Roger Wilkins came out against the flagrant use of taxpayers’ money and have campaigned to defer the consultant’s payment.  Good on them!

Feel free to write to Cllr Turner and Cllr Wilkins and congratulate them on their stand against waste at:

Dymchurch Parish Council
13, Orgarswick Avenue,
Dymchurch.
Romney Marsh.
Kent.
TN29 0NX.
Tel/Fax: 01303 872708

The second report from Kent doesn’t give us much to cheer about.  Ashford Borough Council has given the green light for a “£70,000 public art consultation programme”.  The aim of the ‘consultation’ is to get residents’ views on ‘public art’ (also known as graffiti).  You couldn’t make it up.  Ashford Council have agreed to put up £10,000 (of your money), Kent County Council have put up £10,000 (of your money), the South East England Development Agency have agreed to put up £30,000 (of your money) and English Partnerships, a regeneration quango, have put up £20,000…you guessed it, it’s all your money – on graffiti. 

Please express your frustration to the Ashford Edition of the Kentish Express.  Write to:

Letters Editor and/or Leo Whitlock (Editor)
The Kentish Express
34 North Street
Ashford
Kent
TN24 8JR
Email: [email protected] (highlight that it’s a letter for the Ashford edition of the Kent Express)

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  • Josie Aston

    Public art is not the same as graffiti. Could you possibly describe the Angel of the North (for instance) as graffiti?! I live in Kent and I feel quite ashamed when travelling up to London by train with visitors from out of town, at all the grime and (actual) graffiti along the railway tracks. I’d be very happy for a small amount of my tax to be invested in actual art by artists rather than scribbles by teenagers with a spray can (and no I don’t object to graffiti as an ‘art form’ per se…but let’s face it there aren’t very many Banksys out there!)

  • Mike Ross

    Berwick upon Tweed Borough Council can better that.
    Berwick has been hammerred over the years by the EU fisheries policies, agriculture decline, loss of textile trades to the far east. Our main remaining hope is tourism.
    So the local regeneration director at the BBC has teams out using aerosol cans to spray out signs for tourist businesses, restraunts, a farm shop etc. They’ve also threatenned to remove name signs from the frontages of businesses on trading estates.
    You couldn’t make it up could you?