It’s taken me a while, but here are Ten Ideas to Make Lightwater a Better Place.
- Increase car parking provision in Lightwater village centre.
- Improve traffic management in the village, by: cutting traffic speeds, improving pedestrian access, and easing the movement of buses through the village.
- Provide a meeting point for local youth, such as a youth cafe, particularly for Friday nights and weekends.
- Ensure continued investment in flood prevention and surface water management from all agencies. Publish the schedule of road sweeping, ditch and gulley cleaning on village notice boards.
- Stop over-development in the village, by restricting the further building of flats and and residential care homes.
- Improve village centre amenities and appearance. While Lightwater will never be beautiful, the addition of public toilets, more benches, litter bins and so on will make Lightwater more pleasant, perhaps even attracting a cafe/bistro into the village.
- Expand, update, and improve primary health care in the village through investment in our GP surgery.
- Repair and resurface the major roads in the village.
- Open the Police Station in Lightwater to public access and place a permanent CCTV camera in the village centre.
- Seek an alternative entrance into Lightwater Country Park to reduce traffic flow along The Avenue, potentially offering a motorway rest area.
My next objective is to see how well these ideas resonate with residents, and the priority that they give to each. I’ve got some thinking to do on how I can achieve this.
I recognise that I’ve omitted many things, importantly education and recycling. But I’m sticking with ten ideas for now.
UPDATE:Following the second burglary, HERE, in a week at the bookmakers in The Square, I’ve amended number 9 to read as follows:
- Open the police station to public access and place a permanent CCTV camera in the village centre
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at 10:46 am
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at 5:42 pm
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at 7:34 pm
[...] toilets and for businesses to provide access to their toilets, neatly chimes with number 6 in my ‘ten ideas for Lightwater’, about improved village centre amenities. Anyway, here’s a snippet from Boris’s email [...]
By: ‘Spending a penny’ with Boris « Lightwater on March 21, 2009
at 1:40 pm
Ref:- Expand, update, and improve primary health care in the village through investment in our GP surgery.
Hear hear! But not only financial investment I feel.
Where else would you pay to go to be insulted?
Take your car in for a Service and you get written details of its malaise and even a (albeit estimated) prognosis if needed.
Expect some Customer Care from the Gatekeepers at All Saints? Not on your Nelly!
“You want us to advise you when x-ray results are in – do you know we have 50000 patients on our books? No, you phone in every day in the 7 to 14 day period that the results are expected – like everybody else does.”
“You want a written report on your Check up, BP etc – sorry, we dont do that. No, the computer says NO!”
Move on to the GP; and for his £200K pa he will happily look at his watch and inform you that there are other patients waiting, and that you would not understand anyway!”
Time for published Standards of Performance one feels ! And a complaints procedure with teeth!
Anyone else dread making an appointment?
By: Old Gimmer on March 26, 2009
at 11:01 am
Thanks for your views. I commented on our surgery on September 2nd last year, and had a useful online conversation with one of the surgery’s doctors.
By: timdodds on March 27, 2009
at 2:35 pm
[...] blog to better gauge reader’s reactions to some of these ideas. I’ve already defined ten ideas for Lightwater, which is a [...]
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at 7:31 am