School Surplus Sale II

Last year I facilitated the disposal of probably hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of surplus school equipment to local community groups which had been brought to Halesworth and was then either given away or sold off at a fraction of its cost.

I have just been informed there is to be a surplus sale arising from the Sudbury and Great Cornard middle schools that are closing this summer.

If you are a Suffolk-based community organisation and are interested in obtaining furniture, tools, equipment, etc. please get in touch with Gavin Turner to make arrangements to view or get his list of what's available as soon as possible but no later than Friday 21st June 2013.

Gavin Turner 

Business Support Co-ordinator, Schools Infrastructure

Tel: 01473 264632

Mob: 07912 999288 

Gavin.Turner@suffolk.gov.uk

I have seen a preliminary list and it contains the following. Practically anything that you can find in a school is there.

• Audio Equipment
• Bookcases, Shelving, etc
• Cameras
• Cookers/Ovens
• Cupboards/Cabinets
• Dining Tables
• Drawer Units
• Equipment
• Filing Cabinets
• First Aid
• Floor Cleaners
• Food Tech
• Furniture
• Heaters/Coolers
• Kettles, etc
• Ladders
• Lockers
• Microwaves
• Multimedia Units
• Pigeon Hole Units
• Projectors/Visualisers
• Textiles
• Tray Units
• Trolleys
• TV/Players

This is just some of what was available last year. I expect it will be much the same, so well worth the effort.

A day trip to Southwold on public transport

Greater Anglia trains (Abellio) and Anglian Bus Co (Go Ahead) have just teamed up to offer what many passengers have been wanting for years; a synchronised train and bus service with through tickets to Southwold.

Southwold is one of the major resort towns on the Suffolk coast and internationally renown as a playground for the well-heeled with its Georgian architecture, beach huts, quirky pier attractions and fancy boutiques. It also suffers in the summer months from chronic traffic congestion - which threatens to kill off the golden goose for its businesses, practically every one of them is dependent on visitors in one way or another.

The red trouser gang that pack the trains on Friday nights usually travel to Darsham Station where fleets of pre-booked taxis wait to carry them to Southwold to join their families - who likely motored up earlier in their Range Rovers - for weekends at their second homes.

But until now the car-less or less mobile traveler was at a great disadvantage in visiting Southwold because its good burghers had also decided to ban public transport from the high street, thus preventing buses from reaching the shops in the Market Place. This forced the residents of nearby parishes to either walk another 400 yards each way with their shopping or stay on the buses and continue to Beccles, where they were dropped at the doors of receptive supermarkets. No need to guess what most bus passengers preferred to do.

Recently though, several planets lined up to improve the options for the car-less resident and visitor. After 27 years of lobbying, the Beccles Loop was opened and once again there is an hourly train service on the East Suffolk Line.

Also Southwold Town Council were prevailed upon to provide a minibus shuttle service connecting the Market Place, pier and harbor with Anglian's inter-urban buses every hour, on which a bus pass is accepted.

This now means it is possible to travel from practically any point in London to any point in Southwold on public transport and if an early start is made, it can be a delightfully simple day trip with a train service from Ipswich synchronized with the bus service at Halesworth to Southwold and convenient for the shuttle bus calling at the Kings Head.

This could have many positive outcomes for the communities along the route of the Anglian 520 service as well.

A possible itinerary (as of May 2013) for a day trip to Southwold might be:

Take a train departing Ipswich 08:17 AM arriving Halesworth 09:09 with a £4 Southwold bus add-on.

The bus stop is adjacent to the Ipswich-bound platform so Lowestoft-bound arrivals must cross over to the other platform to catch the 520 bus.

The Plus-Bus ticket allows a break in the journey at Halesworth. This pleasant market town offers an interesting history trail, refreshment at some of East Anglia's best coffee shops, regular events at its arts centre and galleries, monthly auctions and many independent shops in its Thoroughfare, which is less than five minutes walk from the station. If you break the journey here there is no need to walk back to the station, the same 520 buses also leave from Saxon's Way a few minutes earlier.

You can then depart Halesworth on the 520 bus at 09:18 (or add +1 hour to these timings). The 520 route goes along the scenic Blyth Valley via Holton Mill and the Blyford Queens Head to Wenhaston, where the Wenhaston Doom and the Woottens Nursery are worth a journey themselves. The Star Inn here also offers an opportunity for refreshment or lunch.

A bit further on is Blythburgh Church, one of Suffolk's finest wool churches and called the "cathedral of the marshes". The White Hart is nearby and several footpaths can be taken from here around the splendid Blyth Estuary (very popular with birdwatchers) and onto Southwold. Unless you break your journey, you will arrive at the Southwold Kings Head by 09:45 AM.

If you fancy a more active way to explore the town, there is a cycle hire shop opposite the Blyth Hotel and the Fire Station just before the Mights Bridge. Phone 01502 725400 to check their hours and availability.

The first Southwold Shuttle in the direction of the pier departs the Kings Head at 10:05 and 5 minutes past the hour thereafter and arrives Southwold Pier at 10:10 AM. The rebuilt pier is so packed with interest we need not explain it here but don't miss the Tim Hunkin arcade.

After an hour of visiting the pier you can take the next round of the shuttle at 11.10 or same past the hour along the seafront to arrive at Southwold Harbour at 20 minutes past.

Here there is a lifeboat museum, a human powered ferry to Walberswick (operated between 10:00 - 17:00  but stops for lunch 12:30 - 14:00), several cafes and the opportunity for high-speed boat trips on the Coastal Voyager.

At 20 minutes past the hour you can take the shuttle again back to explore Southwold's High Street with its many shops, restaurants and boutiques and artisan bakers, sip some Adnams or begin the return leg of your journey. On the hour the 520 leaves the Southwold Kings Head arriving at Halesworth Station at 27 minutes past. The Ipswich-bound trains leave Halesworth at 41 minutes past every hour until 21:41

I hope you enjoy your day.

CIP Resource Mapping and Referral

I have been advocating for a long time that the common method of providing information on social care services (or anything else) with A-Z directories is not fit for purpose for referring people with acute needs to resources that can help them. You can read my argument why these and most internet searches as well don't work.


As a solution I have come up with a novel method of making directories that users can interactively self-refer themselves or be guided by a non-professional adviser which can be authored in freely available software. I call it CIP resource mapping, CIP stands for Community Information Project.


I have created a blog to post the resources and demonstrations of this method.

http://cipmapping.blogspot.co.uk/

Food For Thought

The proprietors of the Halesworth coffee shop Edwards Restaurant Karen and Kevin Prime have depended on customers' word-of-mouth to advertise their establishment and now they are rated on Trip Advisor as one of the best restaurants in the whole of East Anglia. However, as a working mother and a businesswoman and active citizen, Karen relies on her iPad and her twitter account to keep up with what's going on in her community.

She has a lot of people to follow because despite this country's austerity, or more perhaps because of it, the citizens of this rural Suffolk market town are busy with a Portas project, a Transition group, an Anglia in Bloom entry, implementing a town plan, progressing ambitions for a transport terminus, expanding an arts centre, creating a new health centre and a sports campus. These projects are working together in trying to keep Halesworth a viable place to live and do business. Progress is being made. After three years of hard work by local volunteers, a brand new £200,000 cycle path has just opened connecting the town's park to a nature reserve which will benefit residents and tourists alike.

Like the coffee shops of yore, the town's many restaurant and pub tables is where the latest local news is discussed and shared and Karen and other town traders have, more by accident than design, become an interface between the old and new forms of media. Karen's conversation with her customers naturally bridges what the digerati are saying with those not connected by digital devices. Likewise, her tweets inform the digerati of the views of the man or woman in the Thoroughfare. This kind of exchange is also evident in the tweets by other Halesworth businesses such as the Bay Tree Bistro, Banyan Fairtrade and the Halesworth Toyshop, which was recently honoured for its use of social media by a toy industry magazine.

While this raises their profile and that of the town, some local people have spoken out against social media with the same argument put against Gutenberg's press; that enabling the rapid dissemination of information allows wrong or harmful information to spread as well as good. This is naturally true but it also allows incorrect information to be challenged as well.

So when it was reported on twitter recently that a couple of visitors were upset that the monthly market they had traveled to attend had been cancelled unexpectedly because of another event (it was a bit more complex than that and involved the weather) the reaction of one party involved was to shoot the messenger and complain that such public discussion on social media hurt the reputation of the town. However had that party been as engaged as the messenger was in social media, they could have used it to correct it or explain the decision, or more importantly, offered to hear the complaint. It could be surmised that the reputation the party wanted to protect was their own. People understand nothing works perfectly all the time and mistakes can be made but a negative story thrives in a vacuum of response. Other citizens being alerted to the issue got to the bottom of the matter within an hour and the visitors' complaints were mollified.

Another shopper's comparison of old and new media for connecting and empowering the community was demonstrated recently when the town council at very short notice held an emergency meeting about objections to a long planned bus terminus and they didn't tell the electorate – except by the statutory requirement to post an inconspicuous notice – but social media mobilized the community to take an interest and attend. It turned out by all accounts, though we are still waiting for the official one, to be a very contentious decision.

People quickly realised not all was as well at City Hall as they had believed and, with County Council elections imminent, people began discussing town and county council business on social media and the public attendance at town council meetings leaped by 1000%. There then followed complaints, among others, to the town council and the district monitoring officer that council proceedings were not thoroughly reported in the town clerk's report in the town’s monthly newspaper that came out several weeks later because recent reports did not mention (or did not appear at all) issues that had been brought before the council and already reported in social media. Some found the excuses given for these omissions unsatisfactory.

Exasperated that the dates of council committee meetings were often changed without notice except by a piece of paper on the statutory notice board, a member of the public asked the council if it would embrace digital media and put all advance notices, agendas and draft minutes online. In response one of the councilors spoke out against social media with what can fairly be compared to Luddite opinions then afterwards another councilor phoned the petitioner at home and asked in what capacity they wanted to know the council's business and suggested that if they wanted to know when any meetings were, they only need to telephone the clerk (who works 1.5 days a week). When subsequently those two and three other councilors dramatically resigned last week, personal attacks on them by social media was cited in a prepared resignation speech without any evidence given of it happening. This unsubstantiated allegation was then repeated and not questioned by the local press and no evidence has come to light to date. Besides, by its very nature the perpetrators would be traceable.

The opinion of some citizenry is that these councilors were discovering they no longer had the impunity of public opinion they had before, and so they probably weren't comfortable with such public accountability for their actions.

It was well before these recent events but in conversations with Karen’s customers, some of them asked if Community Action Suffolk could teach them how to use twitter like Karen did. Thus the idea to hold a twitter academy in Karen’s coffee shop was born. After a bit of asking around, on social media in my role as a community development officer, people that had attended a social media workshop for a local tourism body recommended Sean Clark. What with the size of her coffee shop and after the cost of the trainer (though very reasonable) and the hire of equipment there isn't likely to be a profit; Karen sees it as a way she can help her community, even if she can't sit through all their meetings.

The interest in Halesworth has been so great that almost all the places are taken for the first session and so a second session has been booked for the following week.

The purpose of pedantry

The following was the 'star letter' in issue 488 of bus industry magazine 'Route One'. Mr Palmer justly argues that the bus industry "needs to get much closer to the detail of the service". Now I feel utterly vindicated in my pestering of transport operators about the poor placement of signage and unusable websites and advocating for the wider presence of 'bus buddy' volunteers to offer passenger assistance and information, just as the erstwhile bus conductor used to do. In rural areas there is less bus signage and outlets for paper timetables are few and far between and stock levels and accuracy are seldom checked. DRT service footprints cannot be displayed on current timetable websites in Suffolk. A passenger survey in Halesworth found less than 2% of passengers using a concession pass have a mobile phone and can use it to access a SMS timetable.

Your front page photograph (routeone, 9 May) perhaps summed up for me how the bus industry still has a bit to go before car users will be persuaded to give buses a try. 

The photograph illustrated a real life bus stop, the kind of bus stop a car user may encounter on their attempt to give the bus a try for the first time. The bus stop flag lists services 2A, 50, 51 and 963, all of which have been withdrawn, some as long as two years ago. It also lists service 13 (no longer stops at that stop) and services 260/3/7/8 which have been renumbered and misses out services 9U and 62/62A which also serve it. Cue the bemused car user heading back for their car. 

Of course the car user could use the text service advertised at the bus stop to find out real times for buses on their smartphones. A great new idea. Except of course the bus stop location number is missing from the stop, so the service cannot be used. This is just one example of how the bus service provided is perhaps not as good as the bus industry thinks it is, and why managers across the country are scratching heads at passenger loss when they feel they have thrown money at passenger enhancing projects.  

I note another bus operator who recently launched a Wi-Fi service to a local route with great fanfare and branding, unaware that there is no 3G coverage along the route and as such, the Wi-Fi signal on the buses drops off eight minutes after leaving the terminus, never to return.

The industry needs to get much closer to the detail of the service it provides and to whether it actually adds value or simply wastes precious resources, or worse still, builds up the users’ hopes then leaves them underwhelmed. Back to the stop in question, well you could ask is the bus stop not a remote, little-used stop that has perhaps been missed under the radar? No, sadly it is the main bus stop right at the front door of FirstGroup HQ, one you would expect some of the biggest names in bus travel to have used and noted. 

Steven Palmer,
Aberdeen 

HACT celebrates 20 years

Nothing on the EDP website so a scan will have to do.

HACT puts D1 issue to Department for Transport

Yesterday 30/4/13 members of Halesworth Area Community Transport met with Graham Pendlebury the Director of Local Transport at the Department of Transport and among other things, they impressed on him the urgent issue of D1 licensing of volunteer drivers.

Mr Pendlebury is a member of DfT’s central Strategy Committee, and chairs several programme boards and inter-departmental committees on behalf of other government departments. He is also a member of the Audit & Risk Committees of the Government Car and Despatch Agency and the Driving Standards Agency.

He was Director of Road and Vehicle Safety & Standards from 2004 to 2007, with responsibility for road casualty reduction, traffic management policy and certain transport technology issues.

Previous posts in the DfT and its predecessors at senior civil service level involved responsibility for tackling the environmental impacts of air transport (2001-2004) and management of long term strategic thinking and cross-cutting work (1999-2001). He has also held posts in the international aviation and rail sections of the Department, and was Principal Private Secretary to the Minister for Roads and Traffic in 1989-91.

Mr Pendlebury kindly wrote and acknowledged he had taken the issues presented away with him.

The story was reported on the same day of the less heralded news that the Lowestoft Minibus for the Blind have appealed for more volunteer drivers who must be licensed before 1997.

EADT story: http://tinyurl.com/cupn4mb

Background why D1 issue is important: http://tinyurl.com/bnfsspd 

Apologies to the EADT but the report is posted here because sometimes stories drop off their website.

Suffolk: Community transport boss visits Suffolk

By Emma BrennanWednesday, May 1, 2013

CHALLENGES facing community transport providers in rural areas and towns across Suffolk were put to the Government’s director for local transport when he visited the county yesterday.

Graham Pendlebury, from the Department for Transport, met representatives from some of the county’s 19 community operators that all come under the umbrella of Suffolk Community Transport (SCT).

SCT is the first organisation of its kind in England. It was set up with a grant of more than £300,000 from the Department for Transport to champion community transport issues and implement an initial three-year strategy to enhance local voluntary transport services.

If successful, SCT’s strategy will be used as a ‘best practice’ model which could be rolled out nationwide.

Yesterday, Mr Pendlebury took trips on some of Suffolk’s rural links and dial-a-ride services before watching a presentation at SCT’s headquarters in Hadleigh outlining the concerns and the successes of the group.He told the EADT the visit had enabled him to witness how community transport operated at the “coal face.”

He said: “I have been seeing different aspects of the group’s operations today and it has been very interesting to see how it all works at ground roots level. These organisations are run on very tight budgets with a heavy reliance on volunteer operators, which enables them to provide viable services in some very thinly populated areas. As a result, they are able to provide a much more flexible and responsive service in places where people would otherwise become quite isolated. People who use the service have told me today how vital it is to them.”

Pat Moody, who uses the Felixstowe Area Community Transport Scheme (FACTS), told Mr Pendlebury: “The FACTS bus is extremely important to me. I use it to get to my craft club, to go shopping and to visit my daughter. It provides an absolute lifeline because without it, I would be housebound.”

SCT chair, Sue Jay said the group had several concerns which it had put to Mr Pendlebury during his visit. This included a plea to change legislation which places restrictions on people who passed their driving test after 1997, preventing them from driving disabled access minibuses over a certain size without a special licence.

She said: “We want the Government to look at this because the restriction is discouraging younger drivers from signing up as volunteers.” Mr Pendlebury said he would report concerns back to the Government, adding: “I have been very impressed with what I have seen here today. Having an umbrella group to enable resources to be shared is a valid model for all sorts of places, not just rural areas.”