Last Week – A brief review
Saturday – Like many local councillors I hold a regular councillors surgery, which is held in the Gamesley Residents Office, along with Bob Mckeown one of the Hadfield South Councillors, and Dave Wilcox the County Councillor for the area. Tom Levitt the local MP also joins us a few times a year, with this month’s surgery was one of those occasions.
However this month we ended up with two surgeries with the second and actual councillors surgery-taking place this week. With last weeks being in a sense a practice due to the surgery notice in the press not being canceled after a lateish change of date, due to our MP’s commitments in Edinburgh last week. This week’s surgery was overall fairly quiet for me, with a few however attending to see the MP.
Wednesday, saw me with the constituency secretary hat on, attending the AGM of the Derbyshire County Labour Party, an interesting event which I had not attended previously due mainly to it meeting in Matlock in the evening, which is very difficult to get to from Gamesley if you don’t drive! (So many thanks to Alan our Constituency Chair for the lift !)
The meeting saw changes to some of the county party officers, with a strong Unison presence now in place, with Gary Ransford Bolsover CLP Secretary and National Policy Forum Rep taking over as county party secretary. Vicky Lang Derbyshire County Unison Branch taking over as vice chair, along with current chair Dave Skinner continuing.
The rest of the meeting passed along in an orderly fashion, and it will interesting to see if some of the plans laid out for encouraging more members to get involved with what the county party does will come through.
Monday evening saw the latest meeting of the Gamesley on Go Board, which administers the Gamesley on the Go project. Due to the chair running late, I was in my role as vice Chair, Chair for the meeting.
Aside from the usual items of business the main topic of discussion was looking at the future strategy for what happens next with the Healthy Living side of things, which will continue on for a further year after the SRB (Single Regeneration Budget) side come to a close, early next year.
The main proposal is to look at merging the Healthy Living Side of things with the board currently been established to run the SRB funded redeveloped community & sports center. This proposal has a number of benefits, but like anything there is also some down sides the main one in my view being that this new board will loose some of the wider overview that the current board has, due to its need to concentrate on the running of the community & sports center.
That said the only other concern with the meeting, was the poor attendance in a sense, from the community section of the board, with only myself, the chair and one other attending.
