Last night I attended the SPACE AGM. SPACES are a residents group that represent Sebright, Puller, Alston and Calvert Roads. They are one of the best organised and most active residents groups that I know of. The big issue last night was parking. The roads represented by SPACES are almost the last roads in High Barnet that are not in a controlled parking zone (CPZ). As a result they suffer from over spill parking as well as the fact that there is too little space to cope with residents parking …

It seems that the trust is closing because the two trustees are retiring and no replacements have been found. I hope more efforts will be made to find new trustees as losing the trust would be a very bad thing for Barnet.

Barnet Council has just advised Councillors that the Milly Apthorp trust is to close. The trust is a valuable source of funding for many local groups. I am currently trying to find out why this is happening. The text of the notification to Councillors is;
I am writing to inform you that the trustees of the Milly Apthorp Charitable Trust have notified their intention to wind up the trust by July 2010.  It is likely that the next scheduled quarterly meetings in December of the three MACT schemes that …

Last night’s council meeting passed off without major incident. I spoke twice. once on a motion about improving the Great Northern line into Moorgate & Kings Cross’ Labour were calling for increases to train frequencies and having London Overground run services on the lines. I took a more realistic line as there is unlikely to be any money available to  do any of that. It would be nice if we could get Oyster pre-pay running and if the ticket offices were open more often and if the ticket machines worked …

Tonight is the full meeting of the council. I will be speaking on a motion concerning the Moorgate / Welwyn Garden city rail line and on the opposition policy item which is about protecting services in a recession. I will post a report after the meeting.

Today’s Barnet & Potters Bar Times leads with a story about how the Safer Neighbourhood teams would like the powers to be able to deal with issues like dog fouling, low level anti-social behaviour such as littering. At present the Council has these powers but the likelihood of a warden being round to enforce them is just about zero. This leads to a situation where the law is not being enforced and therefore made a mockery of. I can think of no reason why the council should have these powers …

The save New Barnet campaign have just published their latest newsletter. You can download it from the link below.
http://www.newbarnet.org.uk/documents/publicity/

Yesterday afternoon I spent a pleasant couple of hours talking to residents in Puller Road about their parking problems. Puller, Sebright & Calvert Roads are some of the few remaining roads that are not included in the High Barnet controlled parking zone. They are also very narrow and were built long before parking was even a consideration. Even with resident only parking there would barely be enough space for every household to have one car.
When the issue was last looked at a few years ago residents rejected controlled …

BMW bumpers are in demand, so much so that there has been a spate of BMW bumper thefts in Barnet. But here is the strange bit. The police are not investigating this because there is no evidence. Whenever a theft occurs the victim contacts the police and gets a crime number enabling them to claim on the insurance. They then get a letter telling them that the case has been closed.
I can understand the difficulty of catching the actual thief at work as most of these thefts happen at …

The Labour Government has ordered the TA to stop ALL training for six months!
My colleague Matthew Harris, the Lib Dem Parliamentary candidate for Hendon  has set up a petition on the 10 downing Street website urging Gordon Brown to re-consider. Please sign Matthew’s petition on the Downing Street website at: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/TAcuts/. Thousands of people have signed so far.