Audit Commission singles out EDDC Planning Dept as "an area for improvement"
The Audit Commission has published this year’s “league table” of councils with details their strengths and weaknesses. East Devon District Council gets a "good" rating and the strengths and weaknesses are shown below (with our comments in red).
What are East Devon District Council’s main strengths:
It provides good-quality services, such as parks and open spaces, leisure facilities and recycling. Public satisfaction is good.
Well, that won’t wash in Seaton where there are no leisure facilities - except for the holiday village, which will soon be demolished - and where the plans for parks and open spaces in the Seaton Regeneration area are for nothing at all except cycling in the monsoon drain and a “public square”. They refuse to pick up recycling boxes in some parts of Seaton and we can't recycle plastics or cardboard from our homes - we have to take it to dumps 10 miles away. When you try to recycle at the Seaton dump on a Saturday, everything ends up in one dumper.
It provides a wide range of activities and facilities for young people to use.
Ha, ha, ha – this has to be an early April Fool joke - see our post below. Seaton is the only town in
Council homes are in good order and tenants are very satisfied with the services they receive.
Let’s see just how many council homes there in the Seaton Regeneration area).
Most of the council's buildings and beaches are accessible for disabled people.
We’ve been trying to get mats on Seaton beach to allow access to the sea for disabled people for 5 years without success, even though they have been on Beer beach for years. There is no access for disabled people to the upper level of
The council manages its budgets well.
It certainly does – it refuses to spend any money in Seaton!
The council is improving the quality of the local environment through enhancing its parks and gardens and by providing new local nature reserves.
Now they really are taking the p … mickey – they are getting their new local nature reserve by refusing to let us have youth and community facilities!
What are East Devon District Council's areas for improvement (notice we use "strengths" above but not the word "weaknesses" here - New Labour speak?).
Its development control (planning) service is an area for improvement.
Oh, yes! well, they certainly got that right!).
People are not clear about what the council's priorities are.
Well, we are pretty clear, the priority is - Stuff Seaton.
It does not always tell residents what standard of service they should expect.
That’s because they probably think we shouldn’t expect service, let alone standards!
It does not yet have strong clear plans in place to meet its future ambitions.
Well, we are pretty sure what it’s plans and ambitions are for Seaton and they seem very strong and clear – third class development, third class visitor centre, “shopping as leisure” and top class Wetlands Centre for tourists who can only stay 3 hours in a supermarket car park to go and look at it.
posted by Fighting for East Devon's future @ 11:10 am
10 Comments:
East Devon's recycling is not good and Seaton only has limited facilities on a Saturday Hilary
I reckon the audit commission were told the boundary for east devon ends 4 miles west of Seaton, so they didn't include us....now where have I heard that before?
I think we need to be going it alone, we pay a large percentage of council tax for services from eddc...I'm just waiting for some.
Someone did say to me that the best deal for Seaton would be to have the boundary redrawn and become part of West Dorset. Well, at least that way when Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall says he lives in Dorset (he doesn't he lives in DEVON now) I could just keep my mouth shut and agree.
And where is all that money coming from that is being spent in Lyme these days?
Most jobs nowadays are paid extra monies for meeting "targets" I reckon the EDDC brief is to pull the plug on Seaton, and if they get away with it their salaries will increase accordingly. I think the "feedback questionnaire" How well are we doing? often employed in these exercises should be completed exclusively by Seaton residents. Would a few thousand de-merits result in an EDDC pay cut and consequential decrease in Council Tax. I'm afraid not but happy dreams.
I sometimes think we live on a different planet to the rest of East Devon - one that makes us invisible. I reckon we should all stop paying our council tax until we start seeing some action in this town - that would wake them up to the seriousness of the situation!
it is possible for individuals to write to the Audit Commission drawing attention to a Council's failing. The lack of satisfaction in Seaton with the council could certainly be brought to their attention.
Has anyone in Seaton had a "satisfaction with the Council " survey or is this like the Liatris survey for their retail assessment? No-one seems to have had a Liatris phone call about their food shopping, maybe the satisfaction surveys for Seaton are only sent to local councillors.
I was telephoned by a company called (I think) Phase 4 AFTER the Liatris exhibition in the Town Hall. All questions were about supermarket and diy shopping and were obviously driven by wanting specific answers. The survey could not be held up by them as having been of any use statistically.
The Offsted report also says some youth sessions had too few young people present. Wonder where they were. So all that is needed is for Devon County to reassign those resources to Seaton and for EDDC to reopen the Youth Centre and we could have a Youth Club again. Easy innit? Not going to happen though is it?
I've asked before why Seaton doesn't have cardboard recycling and been told they have to wait until they relet contracts. Think they have relet since then and not changed it. In Dorset you can put cardboard in paper bins and they have more recycling bins at large supermarkets. Dorset recycle far more waster than devon.
Hadn't thought of it before but I didn't notice a dedicated recycling area in the proposed car park for the sheds - so I guess we've also lose some of our limited existing recycling too if these daft proposals went ahead!
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