News
All Set for Village Tour 2011 - 60 in 30!
60 and 30 are the key numbers for my 2011 village tour, which gets underway tomorrow with open surgeries at Farndish, Hinwick, Podington and Wymington. This year I will be visiting 60 villages across the Borough in September's 30 days, holding a mobile surgery in each village and talking to rural residents about the issues that matter to them. The village tour is intended to give people the best possible chance to talk to me directly about any issues they want to raise. Clearly it's not easy for everyone to get to Borough Hall for one of my monthly 'by appointment' surgeries, or to one of my monthly 'out and about' sessions, so I hope lots of people take the chance to come and talk to me while I'm in their neighbourhood. For more information about where you can find me or how to arrange to see me, including full dates, times and locations for the village tour, click on the 'Meet Dave' button on the menu on the front page of mayordave.org.
31 Aug 2011
East West Rail - A Powerful Economic, Technical and Common Sense Case
A report published this month by Oxford Economics has set out the potential economic benefits of the East West Rail project, not just for areas along the proposed route such as ours but also for the wider economy, and it makes a compelling case.
26 Aug 2011
Building Strong Communities
My latest monthly column for the Times and Citizen newspaper reflected on the recent widespread disorder seen in London and elsewhere, and on how the uplifting scenes people taking part in spontaneous clean-ups and joining 'broom armies' got many of us thinking about our own communities and how precious they are to us. In case you haven't seen here, I've reproduced it here:
24 Aug 2011
Have Your Say in Difficult Times on Council Savings
As you may be aware, Bedford Borough Council must find £36 million of savings - over a quarter of its current net budget - over the coming four years in order to balance the books. We cannot hide from this - the Council has a legal requirement to balance its budget and £36 million is the funding gap which has to be closed to achieve that. What we can do, however, is to work with all parties on the Council, with staff and crucially with residents to make sure the savings are made carefully and in the fairest way possible. To that end, the first set of proposals on how to make those savings, agreed by all groups on the Council, are now out to public consultation. You can find details of the proposals, and take part in the consultation online, at www.bedford.gov.uk/budget2012. Also, in order to make it as easy as possible for people to give the Council their views, we have for the first time produced an interactive 'budget tracker.' This online tool gives you the opportunity to put together and submit an indicat
22 Aug 2011
New Bus Timetables From Today
If you get either the Times and Citizen or the Beds on Sunday delivered to your home you will know this already due to the 'wrap-around' advertising in the last week, but today saw the new bus timetables for urban and rural parts of the Borough come into force. As I've written here on mayordave.org.uk recently (http://bit.ly/p0Pgf9), as with any changes to bus routes it is not uniformly good news for everyone, but overall across both urban and rural parts of the Borough access to decent bus services is being maintained and even improved. Most buses in Bedford and Kempston are now running until as late as 11pm. It is the first time in decades that we will have late evening buses in Bedford and Kempston, and I am delighted we have been able to reach an agreement on this with Stagecoach and achieve a significant extension of bus services into the evenings. We are also continuing with the new Sunday services we introduced last year, which see the Monday to Saturday routes replicated on Sundays and a minimum frequ
21 Aug 2011