News

.... a weekly column from Dover and Deal MP Gwyn Prosser

19 April 2007

On Monday I attended the official opening of the White Cliffs Primary College for the Arts. White Cliffs has entered into federation with the highly successful Astor College for the Arts under the hands-on leadership of the Principal , Chris Russell. And if you are still trying to figure out where this new primary college is situated – it’s on St Radigunds Road and we used to call it plain St Rads.

St Radigunds was one of nine primaries in my constituency which Kent County Council wanted to close and despite a very spirited local campaign of opposition, Tory Councillors voted to close the school.

The opposition continued, we challenged KCC to come up with alternative schools which did not entail long journeys and busy roads and eventually common sense prevailed, the school was saved and a rescue plan was put in place. The plan was to change the ethos of the school, inject a liberal dose of vitality and provide strong and focused leadership to improve standards – and how they needed improving. For instance, in the most recent year-on-year comparison of aggregated results St Rads scored just 67 compared with an all Kent average of 232 and despite the best efforts of everyone there seemed little prospect of improvement without external help.

That help came from KCC who agreed to allow a federation with Astor and from Chris Russell who accepted the challenge to take St Rads under his wing, re-brand it as a college for the arts and provide the pupils with a new sense of pride in their new school. This was already showing through at the opening, in bright eyed faces of the children who sang The White Cliffs of Dover and proudly showed off their smart new uniforms.

The journey from failing school to aspiring college has only just began and I know that the first leg of that journey has been bruising for some and bothersome for many but the main stakeholders are the pupils and the pay-off will be those children’s futures and I’m already convinced that the firm but fair leadership being exercised by the new regime will be rewarded with higher aspirations and fast improving performance.

I was particularly encouraged to see so many parents attend the opening ceremony. Parental support is a vital ingredient of any school’s success and the presence of so many Mums and Dads testified to the willingness of the community to embrace change for the benefit of their children – they are to be commended.

It’s regrettable that the good people of St Radigunds had to suffer the trauma of facing the total closure of their school before wiser counsel prevailed and the federated option was allowed because some of us strongly advocated this course in our written submissions to KCC. However, having shared such a happy and enjoyable time at the opening of The White Cliffs Primary College for the Arts, I’m content to let sleeping dogs lie and say - ‘better late than never’

.... a weekly column from Dover and Deal MP Gwyn Prosser

12 April 2007

Why has Dover District Council got such a lousy record on waste recycling and why should my constituents have to put up with a service which is simply below par and – judging by last week’s revelation – looks doomed to get worse ?

At a time when even members of the flat earth society are recognising the need to accelerate the switch from land-fill waste sites to recycling, our Council is still struggling to meet the minimum targets set by Government. In fact, until last month they were repeatedly failing to meet the very modest 18% recycling target at a time when other Councils are consistently managing to recycle up to 50% of their waste.

The casual observer could be forgiven for believing that Dover’s Conservative administration is doing much better than they are because they keep trumpeting their tiny achievements in their press releases. For instance in 2005, at the very time that the independent Audit Commission was condemning them for not achieving the minimum Government targets and criticising them for failing to roll-out kerbside recycling across the District – the Council was telling us what a great job they were doing. Two years later they still haven’t achieved doorstep recycling across the District but they are still crowing about their performance.

In the middle of February they issued a press release saying that their scheme was expanding to cover 80% of the District. In the middle of March they published a further release repeating the 80% claim but by the end of March we learned that all recycling of plastics for the whole of the District was being abandoned. That news didn’t appear in any of their press releases of course and up until yesterday DDC’s web site was still proudly proclaiming that their Whitfield, Deal and Richborough tips were receiving plastics for recycling – not true.

When I complained to Kent County Council about stopping this facility without any discussion or consultation they said that it was no longer viable to collect plastic bottles from their transfer stations because most District Councils in East Kent had adopted kerbside collections and thus the volume of plastic arriving at the sites had diminished.

To some extent this is understandable but it only serves to put in focus our local Council’s dismal performance because unlike our neighbours in Canterbury, Thanet, Folkestone and Hythe - Dover’s limited kerbside recycling scheme still doesn’t accept plastics so for my constituents, it looks like a return to landfill.

One of the areas which make up the much heralded expansion of their kerbside recycling is Clarendon in the Priory Ward where I visited on Tuesday. The new system was supposed to start on March 5th but I’m told the Council ran out of black boxes and then found that their new refuse lorries were too big to negotiate the local roads. So Clarendon residents, like thousands of others in this District are still waiting for kerbside recycling and wondering what to do with all those empty plastic bottles.

.... a weekly column from Dover and Deal MP Gwyn Prosser

5 April 2007

 

On Tuesday I came close to being chucked out of Waterloo Station but (party politics aside) I was in good company, being flanked by two Tory MPs, the Leader of Ashford District Council and Kent’s Cabinet Member for Regeneration.

We had gathered together to signal cross-party support for our campaign to stop Eurstar’s proposals to drastically cut back their services to the Continent from East Kent’s international station at Ashford and to hand in our 8,000 strong petition the company. But Eurostar’s Chief Executive wouldn’t meet us and the company refused to allow the camera crews onto Waterloo Station – “it’s private property” we were told.

This growing row has been caused by Eurostar’s plans to slash international services from Ashford when the new station at Ebbsfleet is opened later this year but there is growing opposition from East Kent, Sussex and the whole of the south coast area to these cuts.

Eurostar has never shown much enthusiasm for Ashford International and although it cost £100 million and a large lump of government funding to build the station, the company has done little to promote services from this important East Kent growth area during its eleven years operation.

Now they are saying that two thirds of us who have been travelling from Ashford, will happily divert to Ebbsfleet but can you imagine anyone travelling from Dover all the way to the outskirts of London in order to catch a train back to the Channel Tunnel ? I think not, and let’s not forget that there’s no easy way to access Ebbsfleet by public transport and the local road network is already badly overloaded. Anyway, aren’t we trying to discourage unnecessary car mileage.

According to Eurostar’s website link, the fastest train journey to Ebbsfleet from Dover Priory is nearly two hours and it entails changing trains at Gillingham and walking from Gravesend to Ebbsfleet.

You could try taking the train from Dover to Waterloo East and then crossing over to Waterloo but after November 14th that international station will be closed and all London departures will be from St Pancras which has no rail connections from East Kent.

So why are my constituents and so many other people on the south coast being put to so much inconvenience. Well, Eurostar say that stopping at Ashford would add too much time to the overall journey - but according to Railfuture International, Ashford stops would add no more than 7 minutes to the two and a quarter hours journey to Paris.

But it’s more than a question of individual journeys it’s the importance of Ashford International as a vehicle of economic regeneration for all of East Kent and the damaging signal that Eurostar's proposals are sending out.

As well as raising these issues with Ministers, I will be questioning the consultation process that led to making St Pancras and Ebbsfleet the new international stations because, had Kent known that these decisions would have led to the virtual abandonment of Ashford International, our input would have been a lot different.

.... a weekly column from Dover and Deal MP Gwyn Prosser

29 March 2007

 

I had one of my regular meetings with the Chairman of the East Kent Hospital Trust in Canterbury on Monday to find out what they were going to do with Buckland Hospital, to complain about their transport system and to find out how much they were in debt.

My meeting coincided with the news that the Government has allotted an additional £95.8 million to our Primary Care Trust to help them improve local health services and the additional money will raise local health funding above the one billion mark.

Some £27 million is earmarked to provide better and faster outcomes and additional funding for the Hospital Trust will help the NHS reduce waiting times so that for most patients - waiting lists will be virtually eliminated.

This new cash injection will enable us to meet Labour’s target of ensuring a maximum wait of 18-weeks from referral to treatment by December 2008 with many patients seen even more quickly than that.

This will be a major achievement for the NHS – making it more streamlined and productive as well as leading to a much better experience for patients. It will change people’s lives by improving care and cutting unnecessary delays.

I am proud to be a member of the Party that established the NHS, that really believes in it and is determined to retain it as a truly national service free at the point of access.

In the last ten years we have been re-building it from the decimated state the Tories left it in. They say they want to improve the NHS but they also want to cut spending by £28 billion. They can’t have it both ways. They must decide what their policy is.

Cameron tries to offer everything to everyone, but to be taken seriously he must now decide what his policy is: matching our year on year record investment or going ahead with his proposed cuts.

Labour’s investment has already delivered the lowest waiting times ever, 50,000 extra lives saved from cancer, 150,000 lives saved from coronary disease, 300,000 extra staff - an NHS that is improving the health and well-being of the people of East Kent and the whole of England.

It’s true that in Dover we have had more than our fair share of local difficulties. In the 28 years I’ve lived here we’ve lost Victoria Hospital and Buckland has been under constant threat of cuts or closure for all of those years. Past promises of re-development have been betrayed and each re-organisation has left Buckland looking smaller.

At my Canterbury meeting I received some bad news and some not-so-bad news. I was told that despite all that extra cash there was still no guarantee that Buckland would survive and that no progress had been made to improve patient transport. The not-so-bad news was that although the Hospital Trust would end the financial year in debt again - it would only be one quarter of last year’s deficit.

Should we be thankful for small mercies ?