The main issue raised on the doorstep in past years has been traffic congestion and road safety. As well as regular jams at ASDA – which frustrate motorists, there have also been concerns about crossing to get to school and other facilities and about speeding.

Your local Liberal Democrat team has been working hard to try to improve the situation. You may already be aware that after a long campaign we secured a mix of government and developer funding to increase the capacity at junctions and to provide safe crossings. There was a well-attended public consultation and, after some delay, the County Council has decided to start the land purchases required and we expect the scheme to take about 2 years to deliver. Because the key problem is ASDA’s entrance, Cllr Seib initiated discussions between SSDC, SCC, ASDA and Palmers to see if access off the Palmer’s roundabout can be achieved. These are still on-going a key issue seems to be that ASDA are already trading at maximum and would not see any more profit from improvements.

You may also be aware that the County Council has now run out of primary school places (despite our warnings)! The good news is that this means an earlier delivery of the Primary School at Lufton Key Site (open 2016) and the associated infrastructure. This part of Yeovil will finally get its long-planned community facilities which will include; local shops, a meeting room and a shared hall; as well as a MUGA and facilities for the for the older kids.

During the last Council, we were very pleased to have been able to get a Conservation Area created in the original Alvington hamlet because it meant that Alvington Fields and Highmere would be to a much higher standard, indeed the houses fronting into the hamlet are actually faced with stone recovered from the original derelict barn – recycled and a perfect match!

Another good piece of news is that we were able to get an Airfield Protection Zone designated in the South Somerset Local Plan which will permanently prevent the land south of the A3088 from becoming housing on air safety gounds. We were also able to show how wrong it would be to grow Yeovil to the North-West again (despite a strong, politically-motivated campaign by a certain East Coker resident!). The Local Plan should be adopted in the New Year.

I wish I had known of this web-site back in 2011 when we were contesting the AV referendum. Whilst AV was not the voters’ choice, I spent a lot of time listening to people saying that voting should be made compulsory “like it is in Australia”. Many other people just thought putting votes into a preference order was “too complex”. I argued that it would do away with some of the “us and them” politicking, because I would be unlikely to get second preference votes from the supporters of an opponent I had just attacked. Anyway, click here to see the Australian system in its full and varied glory.

Wicked … or just not up to the job?

It’s not often you’ll find me quoting from a Tory Press Release, but this one beggars belief!! Three local Conservative councillors, including their candidate for the 2015 election, claim that there has been a £13m give-away robbing Yeovil people.

Rubbish!

The truth is that Lib Dems have acted swiftly to save local jobs and to get the Lyde Road estate finished in a difficult market. The Council re-negotiated what’s called a “Section 106” planning agreement to ensure that work did not stop at Lyde Road, that the school and shops could be built and that local tradesmen, suppliers, drivers, etc. did not lose their jobs.

The problem was that the developer would have lost a lot of money on the site if he continued on the old deal, so he had to stop work. We checked his books in detail and verified this. So did the District Valuer. The original agreement included handing over profits which had been projected in the “heady days” before the banking crisis and the recession. In the current market, the site make a big loss, £13m, under that deal.

The new deal we have agreed is to allow more “open market” housing (one in 5 houses at Lyde Road are still “social” housing, so we’ve done well). It also lets the developer off paying for specific extra off-site sports facilities (the site has already paid for some) … unless the site makes more profit than we all expect, in which case a claw-back process can take us back to the original deal. A fuller explanation has been released by Ric Pallister but that document doesn’t mention a key fact: although councils were recently compelled by a Conservative Minister to do deals like this, I had introduced a policy to re-examine our Section 106 deals a long time ago … and it was adopted with cross-party support.

Liberal Democrats work hard to understand the economy and we know the importance of jobs and housing (often form personal experience).

We used to say “you can’t trust Labour with the economy” and “you can’t trust the Conservatives to be fair”. Now it seems we can’t trust the Tories with the economy either!