Monday 11 March 2013

Planning for the Future

Scrutiny has played quite a big part in my diary over the last couple of weeks.  I’ve been attending some school visits as part of the Wellbeing & Attainment panel.  It’s been very encouraging to see the length & depth of the strategies in place to support pupils, both to get the most out of school and prepare them for the future.  There seems to be much more of a culture of two-way respect than I seem to remember from school life in ‘my day’.

As quite a contrast I have also been to one scrutiny meeting of the Allotments working party.  This turned out to be much broader than the term suggests, looking not only at standard allotments but also other forms of community growing.  All present agreed that there was scope for more meetings to follow up the initial positive discussions.

As well as other regular meetings we had the ‘full’ planning meeting last Thursday ie where all councillors are expected to attend.  In addition to the usual planning applications that had been defered to this meeting, there was a very interesting presentation on a proposal to have a Tidal Lagoon in Swansea.  This would be quite a long term strategy aiming for 2017, and would be finally decided upon by central government.  So it was just a chance for us to ask questions with no decisions involved, but personally I certainly think it is not only a very exciting project, but would also bring much needed jobs and many other benefits to Swansea.

Les

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