Regarding last week’s article (Members are not gagged say council) again, us residents should thank this paper for trying to get us information and answers from Pinchbeck Parish Council.
A few years ago I tried to find out what that year’s increased precept was necessary for: no response, and South Holland District Council (SHDC) said parishes were only responsible for giving spending breakdowns if precepts were over a certain amount.
This year’s precept is far larger and must surely fall into that category.
Last year I tried to contact the parish council via the contact details listed on SHDC over a separate issue, seeking their views on a housing development application which had appeared for an agricultural field outside the building boundary of the village and enquiring whether there were any meetings upcoming to debate it.
There was no response initially and I was angry to find their clerk submitting a ‘no objection’ to the planning website and then finding that their meeting had gone ahead without advising us.
I sent a chaser saying I would like to register my disgust at the parish council in not trying to defend the agricultural field from development, lack of notice of parish meeting, and of it not putting forward local information about previous use of the land as a rubbish dump, to enquire whether the land could be made suitable for residential building yet.
Although I eventually received an email from the parish clerk, nobody from the elected council ever contacted us to discuss the issues.
When quizzed over the lack of parish minutes and meeting dates on council website, the clerk said last time she tried to put a host of meetings and agendas on the Lincolnshire County Council web-site everything came out gobbledygook and wasted a couple of hours, but she did intend to tackle this again and hoped it would all work properly.
That was more than eight months ago.
I was invited to have to go into the village to look at the notice board for any information; there isn’t much on it.
Since then, on the website the previous minutes history has been deleted, and as you say the latest is 2017, May/June/July.
I was left feeling that either the parish council felt it’s not required to respond to a resident wishing to register disgust and wanting to discuss the planning application problems further, or wondering whether their employed clerk censors what contact my elected councillors receive!
Janine Twelftree
via Facebook
