In my part of Woking, appreciating the Basingstoke Canal and wanting to see it well cared for and used is, in political jargon, ‘motherhood and apple pie’. Like good food or family loyalty people are automatically in favour of it, and don’t want anything to spoil it.

Yesterday’s meeting of the Basingstoke Canal Joint Management Committee showed, albeit in a civilised, polite manner, the clash of interests underlying any decisions made about its management.

I’m one of the four Committee members representing Surrey County Council.  There are another four from Hampshire, which is a joint owner of the Canal with Surrey County Council. Then there are Councillors from the Boroughs and Districts it runs through, from the Surrey and Hampshire Canal Society, and from Natural England.

I won’t give a blow-by-blow account of the whole meeting, just some highlights from the report by Ian Brown, the Canal Director.

Risk

I’ve put this first because, being a risk-averse person myself, the heading ‘Risk Management ‘ and the words ‘the canal now represents a significant increased risk to the joint owners with certain critical areas going from amber to red condition’ attracted my attention.

It’s ‘interesting’ to note that owning the Canal is not a barrel of laughs for either Surrey or Hampshire - as was noted rather ruefully by the Chairman, a member of Surrey County Council’s (overwhelmingly Conservative) Executive, when he said that for both Hampshire and Surrey the Basingstoke Canal carried the highest of any ‘corporate risk’.

A major contributing factor to rating risk highly is the serious potential consequences of a canal breach. ‘Mitigation’ in this case means vigilance, monitoring the state of the canal and, for example, removing trees that have reached the point where they ‘are directly damaging or threatening the integrity of the canal bank side.’

The ‘amber to red’ comment refers to staffing level problems. In answer to my question about the nature of the risk, I was told that though a ‘number of embankments and cuttings’ give concern, the risk is well controlled and we are ‘not expecting a major, major disaster’ - though it will be good when there can be more assurance after a full condition survey, which unfortunately won’t be completed until 2010.

In the meantime Ian Brown said that ‘if I’m woken up by rain and high winds then I do worry - especially with the tree cover,’ but he has a ‘very good team’. In June last year, when there was a problem with a collapsed culvert, rangers were on the spot within half and hour and the problem was being brought under control within two hours.

Trees - too much of a good thing?

Discussion of the Conservation Management Plan, which should be finalised and submitted for approval next October, inevitably led to questions about tree-cutting, and trees felled in St. Johns to considerable outcry in the local papers. Ian Brown said there were ‘just three trees  … we take tree management very, very seriously … the three trees in St. Johns were three out of nearly six hundred.’ There had been a ’significant risk to the structure of the canal’ , which is only constructed of green sand, with the ‘windmill effect’ of full-grown trees. ‘

He said that there was also generally a need to let in more light for ‘flora’, especially the marginal and sub-aquatic plants that are important to the canal’s SSSI status. The SSSI’s condition is currently assessed as ‘unfavourable’ and needs to be brought into ‘unfavourable, recovering’ and , ideally, to ’favourable’ .

There is also evidence that encroaching mature trees badly affect the water levels in the canal, which is bad for boat-users, wildlife, and the structural integrity of the canal itself. 

It’s one of those paradoxes that trying to ’save’ trees along the canal does no favours to ‘nature’.

Navigation v. nature?

Similarly it can sometimes seem that there is a conflict when boats passing along the canal and the work necessary to make this possible arapparently disturb wildlife and destroy some of the vegetation - but only this disturbance and destruction allows the canal and the SSSI to continue to exist. ‘In the short-term, channel vegetation owes its diversity and conservation interest in part to the disturbance regimes sustained by low density boat traffic and/or vegetation control’; while in the longer term, without dredging the canal would silt up leading to ‘extinction of the waterway and its aquatic communities.’

Navigation v. British Rail?

Canal users have been considerably put out by the length of time it has taken for the old iron and steel railway bridge at Ash Vale to be replaced. The canal has had to be closed at that point, preventing boat-owners on the Hampshire side coming down to the Wey navigation. According to members of the public asking questions and commenting at the meeting, this has caused upset and indignation. The Canal Director explained at some length the complexity of the work in engineering terms. Early approachs had not worked as well as hoped, but ’at the end of the day, the job had to be done’. The bridge had reached a point where safety was the issue and a complete replacement the only realistic option.

The current hope is that the work will be finished by the end of June.

Improvement v. neglect?

The project to improve the Canal towpath, bringing it back closer to its original width and providing a better east-west route not only for cyclists but also for parents with push-chairs and for the disabled in wheelchairs, is going ahead. The first stretch, from Kiln Bridge in St. John’s to Monument bridge in Woking, is now supposed to start by the end of this month,  going on through May. The surface will be tar and chip.

Formal planning permission has been gained from Woking. It was unfortunate there had been ’bad press’ in the local papers.  ‘Rest assured, we are not going to destroy the habitat,’ Ian Brown said.

Potential bad behaviour of cyclists was the concern of one member of the public, who seemed to expect old people frequently to have their bones broken or children to be knocked into the canal and drowned. Ian Brown said that if necessary physical barriers would be put up to reduce cycling at speed; and that there were bye-laws and the authority would be prepared to ‘make an example’.

A more temperate questioner asked whether a risk analysis had been carried out - ‘Yes, Sustrans did a risk analysis … cycling must be self-policing … only a very very small minority [cause problems]’

‘Could a bell be made compulsory?’ a member of the Committee asked.

No commitment to that, but ‘there will be close monitoring’. And not only of cyclists - there’s ‘also a problem with dog-walkers’.

Personally, I am very much looking forward to using the new track to as part of my journey to Kingston for Council meetings, if only the stretch of it taking me into Woking to catch the train. 

The Easter Break has been more broken than usual. Two-week Spring school holidays in Surrey start two weeks after Easter. Easter ifself attracted Good Friday and Easter Monday as days off, giving an extended weekend. 

The pattern varied across the country - in Cornwall and Hereford, both of which I’ve visited over the last couple of weeks, there’s been the conventional holiday around Easter; but this means that teachers and children are now facing an extraordinarily long Summer term, just about twice as long as the Spring term before it.

Staff at Beaufort Community Primary School on Goldsworth Park had a less than peaceful Easter weekend, since only a couple of days beforehand word came through that an Ofsted inspection would take place as soon as they returned, on the Tuesday and Wednesday of Easter Week.

I have been a Governor at the school for over ten years, and am currently Vice-Chair of Governors, and felt the same sort of concern as when my own children went into the exam room - everything ought to be fine, but you can’t help being anxious!

More about the Inspection and its results in a later posting.

Knaphill Care held a coffee morning at The Vyne community centre. This had a dual purpose - to attract more helpers, and to give something back to existing volunteers, who could enjoy manicures and aromatherapy provided along with the coffee!  I was invited along because I had been instrumental in getting the (very modest) funding needed for the event through Surrey’s Local Committee. 

Over the last few years a network of local voluntary organisations of this sort have built up - here in the West of Woking we also have St. John’s Care and Goldsworth Care.  

Other meetings have included an Informal Local Committee session looking at schools across Woking with help from the Local Education Officer, John Ambrose. John and his team know the schools in their area very well, and offer support to schools and to parents. They can help when when problems crop up that can’t be resolved within the normal school procedures, from advising on resolving disputes to helping a school cope with serious emergencies.

The service is paid for by schools and by Surrey County Council, but parents can contact them directly. The telephone number for the team covering Woking, Runnymede and Surrey Heath is 01483 518106 

I’ve also been involved with the Corporate Assessment / Joint Area Review which is an Ofsted-writ-large grading Surrey County Council as a whole, and also assessing Social Services, including those provided by other organisations,  across the County. 

I’ll come back to this later, along with the Beaufort Ofsted.

Issues that people have brought to me this month have included:

• Problems with road lights
• Concern about the quality of the provision of transport for children with Special Educational Needs - in brief, there is a code of conduct, and Surrey needs to be told if contractors do not keep to it!  We also need to be told if it is not adequate.
• I confirmed again that bus stops are the concern of Surrey County Council, but Bus Shelters ‘belong’ to the Borough Council. This is in the context of the bus shelter at the end of Nursery Road, which was accidentally demolished some time ago, I believe by a bus.
• I have found a School Governor for the currently open position in a Knaphill primary school - but if you are interested in this sort of voluntary work either here or anywhere in Surrey please contact me and I’ll put you in touch with Governor Services for more details. You can then, if you wish, fill in a form to let you be considered for vacancies as they come up. 

Concessionary Bus Passes: April the First came and went, and I haven’t yet heard the full outcome. Changes were being made up to the last moment - the press release that went out from Surrey immediately beforehand brought the news that all Boroughs and Districts except Surrey Heath had then decided to keep the 9.00 am start time, and drawn back from moving to 9.30.