Street Naming and Numbering - Ebbsfleet Valley
The Swanscombe & Greenhithe Town Council sent us an update on the first 150 new dwellings at Eastern Quarry which we published on the same day Monday 10 June http://thegmrablog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/eastern-quarry-details-of-first150-new.html.
However, and you may be surprised to learn that, on the 25 May 2013 Dartford Borough Councils Cabinet met to discuss Street Naming and Numbering for Ebbsfleet Valley. The Cabinet subsequently resolved to formally designate, for addressing purposes, the area name for Eastern Quarry and the adjoining development, shown on the plan below, as Ebbsfleet Valley.
Not the end of the world, we here you say, agreed, but wouldn't it have been nice to let local residents know so they too could have had an opportunity to comment on this important decision? At the very least it would have been good to have had some local representation from the Town Council who are after all controlled by the Swanscombe & Greenhithe Residents Association which ironically is led by Councillor B E Read and cabinet adviser on Urban Regeneration. Well that seems to be working well...
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| Ebbsfleet Valley |
In response to an earlier tweet Greenhithe Marina Residents Association Blog: Eastern Quarry is no more...Say 'ELLO ELLO TO EBBS... http://thegmrablog.blogspot.com/2013/06/eastern-quarry-is-no-moresay-ello-to.html?spref=tw … We received a response from the Swanscombe & Greenhithe TC which read as follows
ReplyDeleteS&G Town Council @SGTownCouncil1
@ghithemarina: Please read the DBC CAP A minutes 20 May 2013 & the Cabinet minutes 23 May 2013 re: local representation.
Which we did and after reading the councils minutes, reports and reread the article again, we agree with the Town Council's point in that it does appear the article is being critical of Cllr Bryan Read, by suggesting the community had no local representation at the meeting when in fact Cllr Read was in attendance. However that becomes a moot point as the Lead member for Urban Regeneration (Cllr Read) argued that the name Ebbsfleet Valley would cause confusion for local residents who currently associate the name of ‘Ebbsfleet Valley’ with an area in Northfleet and Gravesend, rather than with Swanscombe and Greenhithe and Dartford. He also questioned whether, given the geography, the area should be named as a valley and suggested that the naming decision be deferred so that a more appropriate name may be considered.
Only to be told embarrassingly by the Director for Improvement and Efficiency that the area name of ‘Ebbsfleet Valley’ had been used at the workshop where the locality names had been agreed and noted that the Lead Member for Urban Regeneration (Cllr Read) had been present at that meeting.
He also advised members that the name was now in general use and had been used to describe the area in the Council’s Local Development Framework suite of documents...
Whilst we must apologise for not being more succinct in the article above the point we are trying to make is really more to do about how little and how ineffective local representations is.
The irony here is we have an extremely experienced politician unable to make a difference to a decision that he and others had essentially already taken at a workshop some years before. And somewhat mockingly that’s exactly what one of the officers told the cabinet.