Yesterday I was a little less impressed as we passed through, as we do every day on the way home from work.

This is, as the council keep reminding us a multi-million pound scheme, so who decided it would be a good idea to put a bus stop in a single-lane road, only a few metres after a roundabout?  A bus only has to stop for a few minutes and the traffic backs up to block the roundabout.  There is a wide expanse of pavement where the bus stop is – more than enough room to make it a proper lay-by bus stop.  The stop in the other direction has room for cars to park, but not the westbound side.

Very poor planning in my opinion.

Last time the council and police managed to calm everything down extremely well, and that was without a lot of warning so I am fairly confident everything will be OK now. Our journey home takes us through Langley Green and already there was a veritable convention of TV camera crews at the community centre and plenty of police on the streets.

At least we don’t need to waste any time wondering what will be on the front pages of the local rags this week!

Grim times, but even so you have to appreciate the irony that the Langley Green mosque is located on Martyrs Avenue.

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 intention was to deliver newsletters to every house in the neighbourhood. We arrived first and took about 500, and I hope enough others turned up after we set out to do all the rest.

I have not really been out in Langley Green on foot much, so it was interesting. You can certainly tell the difference between the older and newer neighbourhoods by the quality of the (mostly ex-)council houses. The older council houses just seem to be so much bigger than the newer ones, and have more space. A lot of them have quite large front gardens, and just seem to be more solid, often with nice brick garden walls and outhouses. When I first moved to Crawley I can remember looking at a place in West Green which had 4 bedrooms, a couple of attached brick sheds and an upstairs landing large enough to act as an office.

Along Martyrs Avenue there are a number of houses/maisonettes which use the same design as in parts of Southgate and Tilgate, where they are in a long block of four with two ‘front’ doors on each end. This means that the front doors face the front doors of the next block and inbetween there is a sort of courtyard effect, which is very familiar from delivering and canvassing in other parts of town, accentuated by the rear brick wall with gates to the back gardens.

I always found this effect to look appealing. Some people have made a great feature of this shared space, but then it occurred to me that this arrangement really does depend on having neighbours you get on with. You can see how some people use that space to mingle with each other, but if you don’t get along I imagine it is a hellish layout to live with.

We felt good about having got a load of stuff delivered, and then came home to see our own pile of Broadfield South newsletters (about 3000 of them) staring at us accusingly. About time to start on them I think.