Today I attended the opening of Enham Alamein’s new butchers by Test Valley mayor Brian Page. The butchers counter in Enham Village Stores offers a full range of British meat poultry and game much of it sourced from local farmers. I can recommend the hand made sausages which were excellent.

The addition of a butcher’s counter adds to the services offered by a thriving village shop. Congratulations to Leslie and Tim on making a success of the shop and proving that village shops can prosper. And good luck to Gary and Debbie in the butchers which is open 8:30 – 4:00 Tuesday to Saturday.

I am pleased to report that Testway Housing has made important concessions in their plans to reclassify The Oval from sheltered to general purpose housing.

The building needs extensive improvements to bring it up to standard and county officials had declared it unsuitable as sheltered accommodation. Testway wrote to residents explaining the proposed changes and residents called in me as, their councillor, to express their concerns

I contacted Testway requesting a review of the proposals and Testway in conjunction with Test Valley Housing department reviewed the plans. As a result residents will be consulted about refurbishment of their kitchens and heating systems, a local letting policy has been implemented to reflect residents’ concerns and the residents’ lounge will remain open for at least a year and no changes will take place with out consultation with residents.

The Leader of the Liberal Democrats in local government, Cllr Richard Kemp has welcomed the direction of the Tory proposals for local government, but has cited four major concerns. “This is a wholesale repudiation of the Thatcher and Major governments which stripped councils of their power and finance and made them into puppets of central government, but the plans lack substance in four areas

1.    They do nothing to correct the imbalance between central and local funding. Whilst central government supplies up to 80% of the money spent by local government they will continue to call the tune asserting national priorities over local ones. They have similarly chickened out of tackling the way we raise money locally by keeping in place the grossly unfair Council Tax whilst we would propose a fair local income tax

2.    They have learned nothing about local mayors. Some Mayors have been successful. And where people decide that they want a mayor they already have the right to elect one. But of the 12 elected mayoral systems in England two are in deep trouble with Stoke already voting to end their mayoral system. If the same proportion of councils generally were in trouble there would be aid teams outside 38 Town Halls today.

3.    They have learned nothing about regionalism. They are, of course, right to rail against the bureaucracies of unelected regional government. But to suggest that employment, housing, transport and planning matters stop at the boundary of each council is ludicrous. Councils must and do work together and should be empowered themselves to develop sub regional and regional frameworks.

4.    Proposals for elected commissioners for the Police are deeply scary. Most people believe that the head of the Police should be a serving and experienced police officer. Although the green paper does not define what an elected commissioner would do there would be no point in having such a position if that person were unable to radically change policing policy and operational policing activity.

Cllr Kemp added: In these proposals the Tory MPs are clearly not listening to their own councillors who would support many of these points especially the one about police commissioners. In particular they have shown that they know little about urban government with many major urban councils like Liverpool. Sheffield and Newcastle being entirely Tory Free Zones.”

I wonder whether the challenge of decentralisation and passing power back to the people will be taken up by Test Valley Conservatives who, up until now, have vehemently opposed the introduction of a town council for Andover.