A week in a life of a local councillor!
Week of 2–6 June | Mendip South Update
Just to give you a snapshot into my week!
I’ve been working on behalf of residents throughout. I held a surgery in Pilton today — being available, listening to people’s concerns. On casework: road defect reports submitted, an ongoing street lighting fault in a village followed up, council tax enquiries, social care casework ongoing, and I intervened on a road closure that threatened to cancel a school sports day.
Each month I contact all ten parishes across Mendip South, sending my monthly report along with information on road defects that have been completed. It’s important to me that parishes know what’s been done, not just what’s been raised.
It’s been a busy week for meetings. The Somerset Executive met on Monday, and the full public Executive ran all day on Wednesday. That meeting is open to everyone — members of the public can attend, ask questions, and see the decisions being made and the reasoning behind them. I also attended the Somerset Rivers Authority Board on Friday.
Two items stood out from this week’s meetings:
Is Somerset being short-changed on public health?
We approved this year’s public health programme — nearly £28 million. But the number that matters is £47.49. That’s what Somerset receives per person from Government. The national average is £75.14. We’re getting 63p in the pound, and we’re the 15th worst-funded area out of 153 authorities in England.
Healthy life expectancy has fallen sharply over the last decade — for men from 66.8 to 62.8, and for women from 68 to 63. People in Somerset spend on average 19 years in poor health. The gap between the most and least deprived communities is 8.5 years.
The money that does come here is being targeted carefully — children’s health visiting and school nursing take the largest share at £9.2 million, alongside stop smoking services, drug and alcohol treatment, health checks for over-40s, mental health and suicide prevention, and £113,000 new this year for gambling harm prevention. The programme was approved.
New housing, drainage and flooding
The Somerset Rivers Authority had a lively and interesting debate on Friday that I feel residents should know about. Developers are required to build drainage systems that slow and absorb rainwater rather than sending it straight into drains — known as Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SuDS): rain gardens, grassed swales, ponds, wetlands, green roofs.
The question on the table: do these actually work, and are they being enforced? A new working group has been established to examine whether housing development upstream — for example in Yeovil — is increasing runoff and adding to flood risk on the Levels and Moors. With development continuing across Somerset, this matters. I’ll be keeping a close eye on it.
Questions or local issues — contact me directly.