A new school for Cotham!

The third and final of the big issues that have been occupying my time of late has been the exciting and very welcome plan to create a new primary school on the site of Redland Police Station in Cotham.

This has been in the air as a possibility for some time. It's been known that the Police had come to consider the station as too large and out-of-date for their purposes. At the same time, the Council was looking for potential sites for new primary provision in the Redland/Cotham area to meet growing demand from families - to avoid a recurrence of the mess left by Labour in 2009 when 300 families were left without places for their children.

Just before Christmas, the Cabinet approved a proposal from St John's Primary School to run an extension on the Police Station site from September 2012, provided that the land deal progresses. It looks like it is doing so and I understand that it is expected that the Police will move out at the end of February. They will be temporarily based at Southmead, but the neighbourhood team will be returning to the area as soon as a suitable site can be found for them.

Given that it is intended for the new school to open in September 2012, things are now moving on very quickly. As the Council's contracted school builder, Skanska are leading the project and are currently consulting with local residents about how the school might look and work. The first consultation session was last week, but there is another being held this coming Thursday (26th January) at the Friends Meeting House on Hampton Road between 2.30pm and 3.30pm and from 6.30pm to 7.30pm. As I understand it, this is an 'open door' event, so please come along if you want to find out more.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am no great fan of Skanska due to their actions during the Cotham School building works. They repeatedly acted in some very questionable ways, especially in terms of working within planning law and responding to the local community, most notably through the felling of four large and beautiful trees on Cotham Road. As far as I am concerned, they have a lot of ground to make up with this new project and I will be watching them like a hawk. I'm obviously delighted to see new primary provision locally, but not at any cost and not half-cocked.

A particular challenge for the new school will be the traffic management and associated road safety issues. Lower Redland Road is narrow and heavily parked. It is not an ideal location for parents to be dropping off their children by car and significant effort is going to be needed by all concerned to promote walking and cycling as the primary means of getting there. As I reported some months ago, there are already plans to improve safety at the junction of Lower Redland Road and Elgin Park and the school needs will now also have to be worked into this.

Teething problems with new waste collectors

As most people will have noticed, there has been a change in the company that the Council uses to collect waste and recycling (and related tasks like road sweeping). This has been SITA for the last few years, but they were replaced in November by May Gurney, who also do Bath, I believe.

As always the case when there is a major change like this, there are teething problems. For reasons that aren't yet completely clear, Cotham seems to have borne the brunt of these and I've had more complaints about waste collection over the last two months than over the last four years. These have fallen into four main types:

• 'Special arrangements' being forgotten, where residents put their bins somewhere that's convenient for them, but which isn't directly outside their house. This often happens with back lanes and the like, with the agreement of their own crew of collectors. There has been an issue with this local intelligence being transferred to May Gurney.
• A super-strict interpretation of the rules, so that May Gurney have been refusing to collect waste that's not put out correctly - e.g. overflowing bins or rubbish in recycling boxes. This is particularly a problem in some multiple occupancy houses and SITA used to be pragmatic if waste wasn't sorted out after a few weeks.
  
• Residents not reading/understanding (or not getting) the information that was sent out in October explaining that some of the collection days have changed, especially over the Christmas period.
• A communication problem somewhere between the Council's Customer Services Centre and May Gurney, so that missed collections were being sorted out once, but that the overarching problem wasn't being resolved.
  

I met with the operations manager at May Gurney two Saturdays ago and we did a tour of problem spots throughout Cotham, so that he could see what was going wrong. It was a very useful meeting and slowly, but surely, all the problems have been resolved - my inbox has gone from being full of angry residents to now being mainly happy ones! There are still a few issues, but there has been a massive improvement.

As I say, I'm not sure why Cotham has been a particular problem, but the rest of the city doesn't seem to have had the same issues. I suspect that it is probably a feature of our demographic mix and particularly the high proportion of subdivided and multiple occupancy houses. These mean that waste collection is much more complex than the suburban areas where every house has one drive and a bin at the end of it.

On the positive side of things, May Gurney are already having a positive impact on recycling rates. The November figure jumped to 48% and I hear that December was 52%! If so, this is a milestone for the city - we're recycling more of our waste than we're bunging in the ground for the first time. This is an important step towards becoming landfill-free.

If you are still having difficulties with your waste collections, please drop me a line by e-mail (neil.harrison@bristol.gov.uk) and I'll do what I can to get it sorted out.

Cotham Residents Parking

It's been a very busy winter for Anthony and I, and I regret that blogging has slipped a bit - well, a lot! We've had three very major issues to deal with (alongside the usual host of smaller ones), so it's zapped the spare time that I usually use to keep people in touch. Anyway, I'll be putting up a series of blog posts over the coming week. First up is residents parking...

As covered previously, there was a consultation on the possibility of installing a residents parking scheme in the southern part of Cotham that ran from October to early December last year. Just before Christmas, Anthony (in pic showing nice clear streets within the Kingsdown zone) and I had a chance to look at the over 600 responses that came back into the Council.

The main thing that we drew from that consultation was that a significant majority of local people supported the plans, either as they stood or with relatively minor amendments. My own position over the last four years that this has been on the political agenda has been that I am broadly positive about the concept of residents parking, but only where it has support from the community. It was pretty clear that this is now indeed the case in the area of Cotham south of the railway line, with this consultation being performed in a much more professional way than the one in Kingsdown a couple of years ago.

As a result, the decision has been taken to proceed with the next stage of the process. This will see revised plans worked up as a result of the comments from local people and these should be available shortly - probably early February. These involve changing the allocation of different types of parking bays, moving some of the lines around and altering the boundary slightly to include the section of Hampton Park south of the railway line. We have also asked the officers to look again at the area around Redland Station to see whether this could be improved - they are also looking more generally at how commuter parking in this area might be managed.

There will then be a second consultation period, which is the one required in law. This will probably occur in March/April and will focus on the mechanics of the how the scheme works, especially with respect to the location of parking bays and so on. There will then be a final decision to implement the scheme taken around June. If this is a green light, the scheme will start to appear on the ground over the summer months, with the restrictions coming into force in October 2012. It is not yet a 'done deal' and there will still be several opportunities for residents (and councillors!) to have an input.

The Council also surveyed an area just north of the proposed zone. This was hampered by a cock-up by the printers, so the leaflets were late going out. Nevertheless, over 100 comments did come back. These did not express a single clear view about the proposed residents parking scheme, although most people were concerned about the possible knock-on effects of displaced commuter parking on their own streets.

Drawing on the comments, Anthony and I have worked to get two specific concessions from the Council officers. The first is that these areas will get their own dedicated traffic wardens to help to stop illegal and unsafe parking. One of the early effects of the Kingsdown zone was that some commuters took to parking in ridiculous places until there was a clampdown. This time, we start with off clamping down on this from the outset.

The second is that we will have an assurance in place that the surrounding areas will be consulted about whether they would like to be in a residents parking scheme within one year of the start of the south Cotham scheme. This means that if these areas do suffer badly from displacement, as many residents fear, they will have the chance to see a solution in place in a reasonable timescale.

So that's where we're at - revised road plans should be out shortly and I'll post them up here as soon as I have them.

P.S. Some eagle-eyed residents have spotted notification signs on lampposts throughout Cotham. These are written in an (sadly necessary) incomprehensible legal language, so it's not immediately clear what they are about. They lay out the final legal consultation for the Cotham Parking Review - the separate exercise to the residents parking scheme which is mainly about protecting junctions with yellow lines. These plans have been around for a while now, but it's finally our turn in the queue. If all goes to plan, the lines should start to appear in March/April.