2022 Annual Parish Meeting

Minutes of Eagle & Swinethorpe Annual Parish Meeting, held on Thursday 12th May 2022 at 7pm

Present Cllr Colin Campbell - Chairman, Cllr Fulton-Sutton, Cllr Parkes, Cllr Parkin, Cllr Brown & Cllr Chennells.

Rachel Popplewell - Clerk

Agenda Items

1.   Welcome 

Cllr Campbell welcomed everyone to the Annual Parish Meeting.  

2.   Notes of the Annual Parish Meeting held on Tuesday 4th May 2021 to be approved as minutes.

It was Resolved to approve the notes as minutes – All Agreed signed by the Chairman.

3.   To receive the Chairman’s Annual Report.

Read out by the Chair. 

This is not a Parish Council meeting; therefore, Parish Council business will not be discussed, and no decisions will be made. For those that don’t know me, I’m Colin Campbell, I am the current Chairman of the Parish Council. 

I would like to thank everyone that has taken the time to attend tonight for the Eagle and Swinethorpe annual parish meeting.

I would like to continue with some thank you’s, I would like to thank Councillors Thompson & Overton for their visibility at the monthly meetings and their continuous support to the parish. Also, my fellow councillors and Clerk, your help and assistance throughout this last year has been invaluable. 
 
The residents of Eagle and Swinethorpe, collectively, we at Eagle & Swinethorpe Parish Council will continue to be proactive in promoting the interests and well-being of the people of our community. 

It’s been great to welcome new members on to the council and everyone’s hard work has not gone unnoticed. 

This time last year the annual parish meeting was held via Zoom, and it was not long after that that we started to venture out of our homes, obviously maintaining a 2m distance. There has been some hot topics within the parish over the last 12-months, one of the main items discussed has been the care home, please let it be noted the Parish Council has tried to engage with the home to the best of our ability, inviting them to meetings giving every opportunity to have peoples voice and concerns heard, we will try and communicate any further concerns or raise any questions to the care home when needed. 

Unfortunately, the neighbourhood plan has fallen to the wayside, due to a lack of community engagement and COVID. If there is a desire to resurrect the project in the future, then the council is very open-minded to this request, but help and assistance will be needed from the community.

The Council has set up a new Facebook page to try and engage more effectively with the parish, which has seen some positive results. There has been a number of polls held, one about parish land and its future use and another one about the kitchen block, with further discussions due to take place at the next meeting. 

I’d like to mention our good relationship with the police and also with the church. The church hosted a great service in February to remember the fallen airmen of the Hampton aeroplane crash which happened in Eagle 50 years ago. It was a big honour to represent the council on the day, particularly with my connection to the RAF. 

As a council we have reviewed a number of key policies over the year and introduced some new ones, one policy, in particular, is the training policy, which sets out the training requirements for new and ongoing refresher training for all Councillors. I would also like to congratulate our Clerk, Rachel, on achieving her CiLCA qualification, well done. 

So, within the coming weeks, the council will be leading the celebrations for the Queen's Jubilee. There is a street party planned on the High Street with a number of activities to get everyone involved. I hope this event is well received by the parish and please enjoy the festivities. After the VE day celebrations being tainted by COVID, this is a much-needed event for everyone to enjoy. 

4.   Annual reports from District & County Councillors report.

The following report was received from Cllr Overton

During the past year I have been able to attend six of the Parish Council meetings at Eagle Village Hall. During this year of sporadic lock, it has not always been easy to be as proactive at North Kesteven District Council as I would have liked but I have been a prime mover on major issues affecting the District, mainly transport and planning. It is planning that is the focus of most villages and is the prime purpose of the Council. Eagle Parish Council has been a good group to work with and it is always a pleasure to visit for meetings. I am particularly grateful to the change in layout of the hall for the meetings and the much better way in which they seem to be run to everyone’s benefit.

During the year I reported and advised on the various Government Grants that were available during the main Covid period. They were administered very efficiently by NKDC and all the money has been handed out to well over 2000 independent businesses around the district. There are currently no more discretionary grants available. 

The Countryside Code and the scourge of litter and possible solutions were a feature of the 2021 meetings within Council. The district suffers especially from fly-tipping. North Kesteven District Council is doing its best with this problem and has installed some hidden cameras in dumping hot spots, with some success in prosecution. 

There are implications from the increasing construction of lagoons for holding digestate from on-farm energy plants. I highlighted the difficulty in current planning regulations of distinguishing industrial development in the open countryside from what used to be considered conventional farming operations. The Thorpe lagoon was an interesting test case which I worked hard on, mainly because of the traffic implications through the village there. Later in the year I led a report from the Lincolnshire Independents giving a view on the new Lincolnshire Transport Plan (LPT5) which we felt did not take sufficient account of the increasing problem of traffic in villages. Although Eagle does not seem to suffer as badly as its neighbours from short cut routing from the A46 it remains a concern for most villages within the district.

Another report that I have been working on is the new Central Lincolnshire Local Plan. NKDC is committed to putting tackling climate change at the front of all its policies. In terms of its own in-house behaviour, it is doing well. However, the planning policy has the potential to drive a coach and horses through the aim of zero carbon by 2030 because of the housing growth plan, forced on the Council by the current Government. We have been pushing hard to get all new housing built to maximum energy efficiency at an early date, but there is a lag between ambition and action due to the slow introduction of legislation. About 450 of the NKDC social housing stock of some 4800 is very energy inefficient, and work is in progress to tackle these properties as a priority. 

The new Local Plan is now in its final stages of drafting and further recommendations must be submitted no later than 9th May. I am currently scrutinising this version, with my Independent Colleagues. It is slightly changed from the version we reviewed in September. I will circulate our final draft of comments to this Council shortly, in time for Eagle to consider any response that you wish to make before the deadline. It is anticipated that the final plan will come into force around May 2023 after the appraisal process by the inspector has been completed over the coming months. However, some of the proposals are already coming into play in planning decisions. The urgency of tackling climate change, which I and my Independent colleagues pushed forward with a Full Council motion in 2020, does at least appear (now) as the key feature of the planning policy and we shall be keeping our foot on the pedal to try to ensure it is applied at all stages of planning. Happily, I can confirm that the whole Council is in tune with this objective but there are still some elements of the new plan that are inadequate to achieve the objective; transport policy being the most notable. It will be interesting to see how LCC responds to this.

NKDC has been promoting Purple Bins to separate dry paper and cardboard from other household waste. After an earlier pilot project, the purple bins are now rolled out across the District and seem to be working well. The separation is bringing in welcome revenue from ‘waste’ that used to have a cost attached to it. However, there are frustrations with some households over the separation of Black Bin and Green Bin waste (plastics for recycling). NKDC has taken a robust attitude in not collecting ‘contaminated’ green bins. However, as people become more used to the system it seems to be working better. The problem remains the unfortunate level of food plastic, most of it unnecessary, and which the supermarkets are being slow to resolve. 

During the year NKDC has had a Local Government Peer Review, which involves a team of Councillors and officers from elsewhere in the country examining the processes and performance of our Council. There were 13 recommendations for our Council to consider and I pressed in Full Council for each and every one of them to receive attention and that a report back to Councillors be made. There were some failings which certainly need attention, however, in general NKDC was considered to be well run and my own experience is that the officers are constructive and helpful when asked for advice and action.

The following report was received from Cllr Appleby

Discovery Court Flourishing Almost one year on

A new £2.2 million development is now home to a lively community of start-up and growing businesses all benefitting from the quality space created there.

Discovery Court contains 15 business units owned by North Kesteven District Council and built on its behalf by Lindum Group, on land which forms part of the wider Discovery Park development in North Hykeham.

Solar Panels another step towards net zero

As part of its commitment to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2030, North Kesteven District Council plans to invest in more solar panels, cutting both carbon and electricity costs.

At a time when both the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the UK government are calling for an increase in renewables, NKDC is forging ahead with its plans to reduce its carbon footprint. 

The installation is expected to reduce the Council’s electricity bill by as much as 25% and save over 20 tons of C02 per year.

With the rising cost of energy impacting all organisations as well as individuals and families, the Council faces its electricity bill more than doubling. It is expected that the solar panels could pay for themselves in less than five years.

The new panels would add to an existing, smaller, installation that currently provides a modest contribution to the Council’s energy usage and carbon footprint.

Central Lincolnshire Local Plan

Plans to steer the future of Central Lincolnshire have been finalised and are ready to be examined by a government appointed Inspector – but only after a public consultation is held on the Proposed Submission Central Lincolnshire Local Plan

Central Lincolnshire covers the combined area of the City of Lincoln, West Lindsey and North Kesteven and the joint Local Plan provides the strategic framework through which local planning decisions are taken within each locality.

Small List of achievements 

Set out and advanced progress towards an ambitious target of Carbon neutrality for both the Council and District by 2030.

Fully rolled-out improved and enhanced recycling project (including an additional paper and card bin) across the district.

Lead the Lincolnshire multi-agency response in ensuring the safe resettlement of Ukrainian and Afghan families and continued to support partners across the Lincolnshire Resilience Forum in pandemic response.

Undertook, with input from 500-plus people, a complex set of elections in covid-secure way to appoint county councillors, police and commissioner, new district councillor and town councillors.

5.   Open Forum.

A request was received from a volunteer/resident asking if we could supply signs to say “This area of the village has been litter picked, please take your rubbish home with you”.

The Clerk was asked to source the signs & costs along with a supply of bin bags.

No further comments were received.
 
Meeting Closed 7.30pm