County Councillor's work for Old Buckenham

Sorting out local problems
Stephen Askew, the Norfolk County Councillor for the the ward covering Old Buckenham, gave a talk at the village Annual Parish Meeting on Friday 31 May. This is the part of his presentation that covers his local work.
Locally, apart from private constituent issues I have had several matters to try to resolve on behalf of the parish. These have mainly been drainage issues and I’m pleased to say that with the exception of Church Lane, these appear to have been sorted.
The parish has had the benefit for the second year running of a significant contribution of my “Member's personal budget”.  The sum of £675 was allocated to assist clearing and re-establishing the ditch on Hargham Road to prevent the flooding which had been occurring at every significant rainfall and a further £1242 was spent to clear the ditch further along by The Green alongside “The Kenyons” which should ease the troubles which have occurred between The Green and Mill Road. It is felt that there may need to be some remedial works in the future at the drain outside “The Hawthorns” but for the moment the works undertaken should suffice in the short term. A total of £1917, which is just shy of a third of my budget, has been spent in Old Buckenham this financial year so it has done quite well.
Church Lane has been more problematic. After several attempts to resolve the issue, all sources of routine maintenance have been exhausted. I chased this up only last week to get clarification of the next steps and was told that the matter will be briefed for a future drainage scheme. What form and timescale that might take, I don’t know as yet but I will keep it live and press for the matter to be resolved as soon as is practically possible.
The other major item which has been ongoing and taken up a significant amount of my resolve has been the matter of the pedestrian crossing. It has been some two years or more since I had a mandate from the Parish Council to try to establish a pedestrian crossing on the B1077 following public concern over the dangers of crossing this busy road at school time. In those two years I have had a number of meetings with the sub group set up by the Parish Council consisting of some current and previous Parish Council members, met on site with members of the committee, our MP George Freeman and Tom McCabe the director of the then Environment, Development and Transport (EDT) portfolio, spent £1500 from my member's budget to get an assessment from officers to establish what type of crossing is required and where suitable to deploy it. As a result of this we achieved a line in the budget for a crossing to be deployed should the scheme meet all necessary criteria and overcome the hurdles on the way (such as planning regulations, permissions and safety criteria). I have had further meetings with officers and numerous correspondence along the way and I’m pleased to report that at present it is hoped that everything will be in place for the programming of works to start on the construction of the pedestrian crossing from Monday 29 July 2019 in time for the new school year at the start of September. Of course it’s never over until the fat lady sings but at the moment I’m as confident as I’ve been so far in this journey that the parish should have the crossing for future generations it has sought.