A Repair Café will be held later in the Autumn and when we have a dry Saturday, we’ll put together a working party for paint the War Memorial railings, hopefully before November. We’ll be holding a village tidy in November, and we’ll let you know when this is happening. Kevin Comer has been working on a new version of the village website, which will continue to provide village news and details of future events. This will be available shortly. We’ll continue to walk the Parish footpaths, once the weather improves! Please let us know of any issues you find with local footpaths so we can resolve them.
At our recent meeting, council members discussed better communication, both advertising of council events and communication with residents. Any ideas on how you would like us to easily communicate with you are very welcome.
Our work on the Village’s Neighbourhood Plan is now complete, and we wait for the outcome from the County examiner. Speeding vehicles was one of the issues raised by residents in the Neighbourhood Plan survey. We are working on the possibility of bringing Speed Indicator Devices to the village, we need your feedback, and we’ll be asking for your views on this project very soon.
As we work our way towards winter, members of the Parish Council will be attending a Parish Preparedness event to ensure we have resilience in place for the any weather and other events which may occur over the next few months.
Sarah Wakefield, one of our two local Somerset County Councillors and who attended the meeting, updated us on NHS/Council plans for changing hospital discharge pathways towards discharging more patients directly to their homes with targeted care packages rather than in bedded pathways to Community Hospitals – where this is safe and appropriate. Closure of some of the beds in community hospitals will free up space for local diagnostic and treatment centres for Cancer and other care closer to home and in a community setting. Councillors expressed their reservations about this approach without additional funding for staff to care for people in their own homes and Sarah said that extra funding would be needed if this placed an additional burden on council tax funded adult social care. She also told us about the relatively small number of Asylum Seekers housed in Somerset whose housing is funded entirely by the government. Airband now say that the company is planning to complete the work they started a while ago to roll out fibre broadband (starting next May), but the map Sarah has been given indicates Hatch Beauchamp will not be included in this work. Sarah has assured us she will seek further clarification on their plans for our village.