Watch film of the meeting here:
Cranleigh took a unanimous – bar an abstention from Annie Milton’s Mole – vote of NO CONFIDENCE in ‘Your Waverley’s EXECUTIVE!
Middle England was out in force last week, packing Cranleigh Village Hall at the behest of the Cranleigh Civic Society. and protested against the concreting over of “their village.”
In the left-hand corner, three intrepid Parish Councillors – Pat Ellis, Mary Foryszewski and Liz Townsend – heard parishioners vent their feelings all over the village hall. In the right-hand corner, three representatives of The Cranleigh Civic Society (CCS) whose anger was directed at Waverley Borough Council, which it claims, despises and ignores the views of the local voting fodder (except when there’s an election in the offing.)
Our Regular readers, ( we clocked up over 1,200 yesterday,) will be pleased to know that, residents got to the bottom of some of the questions that have baffled them for a very long time:
Q: When is a secret meeting not a secret meeting?
A: When the public find out about it!
Oh, and we’re sure you’ll all be very relieved to know that Councillor Pat Ellis didn’t attend one of the secret meetings that wasn’t a secret meeting because she got there just as it was finishing!!! As one gentlemen was overheard to say,
‘You couldn’t make it up.’ Really, you couldn’t!
Sadly, Cranleigh people have been slow, far too slow, to wake up and smell the coffee – or, in this case, the concrete!
It’s only now, with 1,328 new homes about to settle in its green fields and with many more planned, they realise that Cranleigh has become Waverley’s ‘dumping ground for 44% of the borough’s housing quota’. Oh – and the latest ‘secret meeting,’ with 14 developers, which isn’t secret – even though some of its own councillors were banned from attending – because, the minutes will go up on the website. Who writes the minutes … say no more. A calculated guess? Infrastructure Problems – water, sewage treatment… and a call for yet more sites?
All this development will come to pass despite the fact that Cranleigh’s infrastructure is groaning under the weight of existing homes. It could be on its knees by the time Amlets Lane, Hewitts Industrial Estate, Horsham Road, Knowle Lane and and West Cranleigh Nurseries – all consented – come out of the ground. By the time pending applications are consented Cranleigh could be swimming in sewage – always assuming the population hasn’t already expired from ingesting asbestos fibres which are seeping into the drinking water supply.
Cranleigh Civic Society’s Adrian Clark, broke the bad news – that 29.6% of Cranleigh’s water pipes contained blue asbestos cement. They had a 70-year life span and there was no provision to replace them. When new homes come on stream,( literally,) they must, by law, have one bar water pressure. Trouble is, the old asbestos pipes aren’t designed to take that degree of pressure, therefore, every time people living in those lovely new developer built homes turns on the taps or flush the loo, they will send a spurt of water up the pipes that will dislodge even more blue asbestos into Cranleigh’s water supply!
Ask the people of Godalming? One contacted us to say their water softener blew up due to increased water pressure and their home was… under water!
Stand by your beds! Matron Milton is about to be on the receiving end of a petition from very, VERY, VERY Cross of Cranleigh, demanding she does something about the upgrading of Cranleigh’s water pipes. Our advice to the (CCS) and Cranleigh folks:
Matron Milton has been lobbying Thames Water about the affluent’s effluent in Alfold. but two years on – or is it three? it’s still coming up through their bathtubs and into their appliances.
So … start stockpiling bottled water as we confidently predict there’s going to be a run on bottled water in Cranleigh once this article gets tweeted and re-tweeted! In fact, start stockpiling milk too, you may need it to bath in. If it’s good enough for Cleopatra, it’s good enough for The Cranleigh Babes!
But, as some enlightened soul pointed at the end of the meeting, it’s all about politics! And, the problem in Waverley is, I know we’ve said it before – if you stuck a blue rosette on a monkey’s arse the good people of Waverley would vote for it! The councillors, officers and politicians don’t give a Donald Duck what Waverley’s man in the street thinks because they are confident he will carry on voting for them!
This was underlined when a UKIP man from Farnham – said he had attended another meeting at ‘YW’ on 12 August 2014 when the majority of councillors present made it all too clear that they didn’t agree with the content of the daft Local Plan but then 38 Conservative councillors all voted for it, leaving their three Independent / UKIP colleagues to vote against.
Why? Because Conservative councillors are whipped; the decision had been taken, by the Party, before the meeting took place. And they call it democracy ...
As Cllr Mary Foryszewski rightly pointed out, ‘You, the people voted for us to represent you and if you don’t like it, you need to do something about it.’
And there you have it folks, if you don’t like what Your Waverley is doing in your name YOU – yes, we’re talking about YOU PERSONALLY …
…need to volunteer, get involved, become councillors, give up some of your spare time and walk the walk, not just talk the talk! And, yes, it is far easier said than done because as we all know, your busy people, you’ve got lives to lead, children to feed, jobs to go to and, at the end of the day, it’s much easier to leave it to someone else to do and then just have a moan about it when you don’t like what they do.
A lot of hot air was vented at that meeting but, in reality, it’s all over bar the shouting. How do we work that out? Because none of the vested interests, that turned up for the last public meeting, bothered to turn up. Why? JOB DONE!
No Berkeley Bunnies, Lettuce or Leafy’s – No Thakeham Thugs – or Crest’s Cowboys. They are all celebrating having successfully secured a planning permission to build many hundreds of homes on recognised flood plains – trousering millions.
A middle aged woman who was overheard to say, when asked what she thought of the meeting – ‘Unfortunately, whilst they all mean well, I’m very much afraid they’re shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted …”
We couldn’t have put it better ourselves!
Dear Waverley Web,
In your editorial on the 30th May, you stated that I had said that 29.6% of Cranleigh’s drinking water pipes are made from blue asbestos cement. What I said was that 29.6% are made from asbestos cement, and we suspect that this could be blue asbestos.
Thames Water has told Cranleigh Civic Society that they are made from white asbestos, but on the Health and Safety Executive’s website, it states that pipes made up until 1969 are mainly blue asbestos, and we think that Cranleigh’s asbestos cement pipes were installed prior to 1969. This is also consistent with other data we have found. (Blue asbestos is far more dangerous to our bodies than white asbestos.)
We have taken this up with Thames Water and they have agreed to take samples next time they are working on any burst asbestos cement pipes in Cranleigh and to get them tested in an independent laboratory.
Kind regards,
Adrian Clarke, Cranleigh Civic Society
Thank you for tis very detailed explanation. No doubt Thames Water will be out soon? Someone wrote to the Waverley Web yesterday to say that water was”gushing” down the Horsham Road near the Baynard Estate. However, we cannot confirm this – so perhaps someone could nip down there when work starts and ppp…pick up a pipe or two!