Sandy 4 St Albans » Street and Pavement Survey

Historic clean sweep for LibDems in St Albans

sandy — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:43:00 +0000

I do not believe that Conservatives and their forbears have ever failed to win a single council seat in the St Albans parliamentary constituency. Well the impossible happened last Thursday when the Liberal Democrats won every single county council division lying wholly or partly within the St Albans constituency boundaries. As Herts County Council’s own website shows, there is a splash of yellow across the middle of the county.

The picture above shows seven of the eight LibDem councillors from the St Albans constituency with the road and pavement dossier which has become a metaphor for Conservative failures in Hertfordshire.

For the remarkable result can’t just be explained by the current St Albans MP’s tangle over expenses. The simple fact of the matter is that our critique of the current Conservative administration in Hertford really hit home. An absolutely abject performance on roads and pavements. Failure to plan ahead for school places. An Adult Care Service which had a starring role on Panorama (not for good reasons). Inadequate youth services. £28 million thrown away in dodgy Icelandic investments. Council tax doubled in just ten years. And a chief executive paid more than the Prime Minister (though perhaps performance related pay would mean that virtually everyone should earn earn more than Gordon).

No wonder St Albans was not the only place in Hertfordshire where LibDems made gains off the complacent Conservatives. For the first time we are the main opposition party. Now we need to really hold their feet to the fire.

Collective Cry of Rage on the State of Roads and Pavements

sandy — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 10:57:29 +0000

We have finally completed the mammoth task of collating all the responses to our roads and pavements surveys which was delivered earlier this year to over 36,000 households in St Albans and the surrounding villages. Nearly 2,500 households completed and returned the two-page questionnaire. Responses came from all areas and from across the political spectrum. It was a collective cry of rage at the dangerous condition of so many roads and footways and at the visual pollution caused by shoddy patching where any repairs are carried out.

86 percent of respondents are dissatisfied with the condition of the local roads, and 66 percent named specific roads that are so bad that they pose a real danger to users. Some of these feature so often that we can list them in a ‘Herts Highways Roll of Dishonour.’

64 percent of respondents were dissatisfied with the condition of local pavements and footways, and a startling 29 percent of those completing the surveys reported falling over, sometimes with quite serious injury. They all expressed their rage and frustration with what had happened to them.

I have never known any single issue strike such a chord with local residents.

When we know the name of the new person in charge of roads and highways at County Hall after Thursday’s elections, we will be presenting the dossier to him or her and demanding immediate action to get a grip on Herts Highways’ woeful performance.

Click here to download the dossier as a PDF file (about 3 Mb).

200 year roadworks – it’s official

sandy — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 09:46:37 +0000

I am indebted to local resident Tony Price for drawing my attention to a piece in yesterday’s The Register, an online running commentary on the IT industry and an old sparring partner when I worked for BT.

They in turn are indebted to their reader Paul Smith for alerting drivers to ongoing and rather prolonged roadworks in Hertfordshire, albeit with “slight” impact on traffic flow. They publish a screen grab of the ELGIN (electronic local government information network) website showing planned roadworks – you can see it here.

Readers will be pleased to know that according the the ELGIN site roadworks are currently ongoing by Three Valleys Water having started on 06/12/2001 and with an estimated completion date of 10/12/2201. They advise that the impact is “slight” but “delays possible”.

As The Register says, doubtless the gas board will move in as soon as Three Valleys complete and extend the roadworks for another 200 years…

You could not make it up!

PS Elgin is a very handsome stone built town in the north-east of Scotland with some very fine buildings – it does not deserve to be used as an acronym for Hertfordshire road misery