As a result of having a new toy to play with I probably took a lot more portrait-type photos that I should have done. Here are a few of the pics.

Some of the food

Polish dancing

Manny, stalwart of the CCAR committee and work colleague

Jim - another work colleague, and one of my favourite photos

Jayne - she came along when her shift finished to take me home

Despite the appalling weather and conflicts with normal electioneering we had a good turnout and were able to talk to voters or deliver leaflets through doors in West Green, Ifield, Bewbush, Ifield West and Gossops Green.  We will be doing more there and also in Pound Hill South, Tilgate and the four wards in Reigate & Banstead where the BNP are standing.

The message was generally well-accepted and the response was positive.  One notable exception was an idiot in Ifield shouting something about how we need to reclaim our country and not be giving it away.  The integrity and consistency of his opinions was compromised slightly by him wearing a Chelsea shirt with ‘Vialli’ on the back.

Quite how successful Chelsea would be without their Russian owner, Israeli manager, his Portugese predecessor, and the African, Italian, German and Italian players I am not sure, but that’s another discussion all together.

Over the next few weeks  the Wealden UAF will be out and about again and if anyone is interested in coming along they should get in touch – details on the WUAF website.

Time to dance brings you a Ballroom and Latin Social Dance this weekend.

On Saturday 1st December from 8-11pm their will be a Ballroom, Latin and sequence event. The evening will be for both experienced and new dancers with teachers on hand to ensure that you can hit the floor with confidence.

Why not come and learn to cha cha or waltz your way around the floor.

The evening will be held at Bewbush leisure Centre and tickets can be reserved by contacting Marie Ovenden on 01293 438328. Please bring your own refreshments.

Tickets are £6.00 or £3.50 for concessions.

Time to Dance is a shared initiative from Community Development, Community arts and the Active Crawley Team.

Just don’t tell Jayne about it. She might like the sound of it.

The venue is the Holy Trinity School 6th form centre, Buckswood Drive, Gossops Green.

There is a slight whiff of futility about these meetings because the committee has very few powers to make decisions: it can only make recommendations or comments for the whole council to take into consideration when making the actual decisions. Added to that, the county council is Tory-dominated but the West Crawley Committee is 100% Labour – I think it is the only one in the county with more than one Labour member, as nearly all the Labour county councillors represent divisions in the West of Crawley.

Having said that, the committees were set up to solicit opinions and there is a chance that recommendations from it will be taken into account, especially if they are backed up by public opinion. Some of the agenda could be heavy going, but there are some important issues which are of particular interest to residents of this area.

The way I look at it, the county council have made an effort to set these meetings up in Crawley instead of being out of sight in Chichester, so the least we can do is try and turn up. If I did not have a previously-arranged piss-up to host I would be there myself.

Topics like the fire station, hot school meals, grant applications and the transport/highways works programmes should provide enough interest for the public, and I hope that the local papers will send someone along too. If nothing else, it is always good to see Ralph Wright from the highways department in action – he really should have been a politician instead of an officer.

The last one of these meetings I went to had very few members of the public in attendance, unless you count about 20 borough councillors. Lets see if we can get a few more this time around.

Items on the agenda include:

Update

Developments since the last meeting, including the Northern area bookbus, the fire station, and hot school meals. Only 10 minutes is allocated to this, so expect a basic update and not a major discussion.

Public Questions

Any questions – although there is a request that anyone with complex questions should submit them before the meeting to allow them to give a more substantive answer.

Highways and transport works programme

This is all about a report on the programme of works for the next two years. The committee is to respond to the report. (The actual schedule is in an appendix to the report)

Community grants

Another report, this time about applications received for community grants.
Applications have been received from:

• Chestnut Tree House
• Crawley CVS
• Crawley Audio News
• 2nd Ifield St Margaret’s Scouts
• Broadfield Youth & Community Centre
• CTL Anglican Church
• The Happy Hut Care Group

The committee will be considering each of these applications, and I think this is the bit where they actually can make a decision. The committee has a budget of £20,000 which can be allocated. Applications total £18,160 plus “a contribution” for the scouts, so they should all be OK, but I don’t know if they intend to hold onto anything for contingencies.

Minerals & waste development framework

Yet another report, this time about public consultation on the draft minerals and waste core strategy and strategic waste site allocations.

General information on county local committees can be found here, including full agendas, answers to frequently asked questions, and contact details for anyone who wants to know even more.

It is worth mentioning something first about how the figures were derived. Something like child poverty is difficult, possibly impossible, to measure. (See The Tyranny of Numbers by David Boyle for a good book on the difficulties of measuring sociological elements) What the JRF have done is made an assumption that child poverty has a positive correlation to the level of children living in families which are in receipt of workless benefits, which seems to be quite logical and sensible.

This means that if a ward is said to have 35% of children in such familes while the national average is 21% it does not necessarily mean that 35% of children are in poverty. It could be a bit higher or a bit lower but the important point is that whatever it is it is almost certainly significantly higher than the national average.

It is quite a useful tactic – to estimate something which can’t be measured by finding something which can be measured and which has a strong chance of being related. It does not even matter whether its a direct relationship or whether both are the effect of a common cause: as long as you can be fairly sure of that relationship you can start to gather valid data.

Sorry. I made a quick detour via nerdsville there. Back to the numbers.

Although Crawley fares quite well compared to Oxford it is still not happy reading. Overall the town has levels of child poverty of 18.3% – below the national average of 21%. But of the 15 wards in Crawley 3 are higher than average with the worst being a full 10 percentage points higher than the national average – and that is the ward where I live, Broadfield South.

The full results are:

31.4% Broadfield South
28.2% Broadfield North
24.9% Bewbush
20.2% Ifield
19.9% Langley Green
18.8% West Green
18.5% Northgate
17.2% Tilgate
16.8% Southgate
14.2% Three Bridges
14.1% Gossops Green
11.5% Furnace Green
9.0% Pound Hill South
8.0% Pound Hill North
5.3% Maidenbower

As I said, this is particularly depressing for us in Broadfield but it is not telling us anything which we didn’t already know. Plenty of surveys and reports have shown the various indices of deprivation in Broadfield to be high. Indeed the results of similar previous surveys are the reason why Crawley has a Surestart centre and why it is located in Broadfield.

Surestart is unlikely to directly reduce child poverty levels in anything other than the long term, but it does offer brilliant support and assistance for those families and (lets not forget) all the other families in the area.

Before we all get carried away with the usual knee-jerk reactions about Broadfield being some sort of sink estate lets get a bit of perspective though. The total figure of 29.7% for the whole of Broadfield means that just over 70% of children are not in families which are dependent on benefits, so don’t write them off!

Conversly, much as I welcome the presence of Surestart and other initiatives here in Broadfield and appreciate that it does make sense to concentrate such efforts where there is most need we should not forget those children suffering from poverty in Maidenbower and Pound Hill.

It is well documented that those wards are amongst the richest in the country, as measured by average income of the residents, but the important thing to remember about averages is that they are, well, averages. It is bad enough to be in a family classified as poverty-stricken but how much worse to know that any potential help is less likely to reach you because you are in a ‘rich’ area?

As there are, according to the JRF data, 1550 children in poverty in Broadfield and Bewbush it does make some sense to concentrate efforts here, but spare a thought for the 325 children in poverty in Maidenbower and Pound Hill. Having wealthy neighbours doesn’t help them at all. There is no trickle-down at work there.

Interesting fact: because of the larger number of children in Maidenbower, there are actually more children in poverty there than in Furnace Green despite the percentage figure only being 5.3% compared to Furnace Green’s 11.5%.

By all means lets continue with efforts in the most seriously affected areas, but do not ignore the rest. Remember that of all the under-15s affected by child poverty in town 73% live outside Broadfield and Bewbush and nearly 10% of them live in Pound Hill and Maidenbower!

As a whole we should really be scandalised that nearly 1 in 5 children in the town are dependent on benefits and not satisfied just because that is better than the national average. The acceptable level should be zero.

The first was the Ifield Barn Theatre to see Alladin. Its a great little theatre. Only 80 seats, and a tiny stage, but the auditorium is raked and they are all proper soft tip-up seats. The facilities are superb for such a small theatre.

Its a quirky place (just like its web site) but has a certain visual appeal (unlike its web site – sorry chaps).

I was there with a school party from Manor Green college which had block-booked every seat in the house, but I didn’t take my camera what with it being dark and everything, and that corner of Ifield really is dark! You really are on the edge of town there and it does feel more like a village than anything else.

On Saturday I was over in Bewbush at the Barn Church, which is actually part of the Ifield Parish I believe, for the annual World AIDS Day memorial service – held a week late this year for some reason.

I’m sure I wrote about this last year. Its a brilliant service, kept short and sweet which is the only way I can handle church services, and with a decent buffet laid on afterwards.

Since last year Jayne has got a job with Mid-Sussex Body Positive who organise the service and got roped in to do the food. I was able to take these photos an hour before the service, after dropping off all the plates of goodies.

Its a fascinating building, as conversions so often are. It was a very simple barn – just a plain rectangular footprint – with those great old timber beams. The conversion has also kept it simple. There is a main church room at one end and a small community room at the other end. In the middle is a small entry hall.

The architects did a good job by keeping it simple, and achieved a very light and airy space by glazing the apex at either end and putting a large set of floor-to-ceiling windows on either side wall.

The furnishing of the church is in a similar plain but tasteful vein with an emphasis on blonde wood and wrought iron. Its like the Church of IKEA.

Apart from the building itself, the setting is remarkable. There is a large old house opposite, one of the original buildings from before Crawley started sprawling – now owned by the council – but otherwise its all standard modern Wimpey/Barratt/Persimmon-type houses.

The remarkable thing about it is how quiet it is. At midday on a Saturday there was just one small child on a bike. The place is well worth a visit – how about World AIDS day next year?

One last picture. I took this snap of a bench outside the church because I just liked the look of it, with the gaily-painted plant pots all weathered and worn. It was only when I loaded it onto the computer that I noticed the detail in the background in the left of the frame, but really it was not intentional. I am not that obsessed with the things. Well only a little.

The service is actually designed to be short, to attract people who are not regular churchgoers. There is no fancy language and only two hymns which are both easy ones. On top of that the sermons are straightforward and interesting. Last year it was Fr Leonard Doonan from Ifield, this year a vicar or priest or something from Brighton. Afterwards there is a decent buffet with wine, tea and mince pies.

In fact, the only low point is the attendance. It wasn’t too bad this year – about twenty people I guess – but only in comparison with last year. Most people there have some connection with Mid Sussex Body Positive, the local AIDS charity. There were staff from MSBP, trustees, funders, and the local MP who supports the cause.