A brief sojourn with my Council colleagues

Monday saw me heading to Creeting St Peter for our final meeting of the 2024/25 fiscal year. I have to admit that it feels a little odd to be chairing a Council that serves a community that I no longer live in, but I still feel that I’m making a contribution, and until my colleagues conclude that they’d be better off without me, I’m happy to serve.The agenda was a fairly light one, but with a vacancy and a colleague unable to attend, it was mostly a meeting of noting reports.We did discuss the proposals for local government reform, benefiting from the presence of our County Councillor, Keith Welham, and one of our two District Councillors, Ross Piper.It’s all rather unsatisfactory, as there’s no sense of agreement between the two key players - the County Council on one hand, who want a unitary County, and the massed ranks of the four Districts and one Borough, who want two or three smaller Unitaries. And there’s an awful lot of “well, if we got this arrangement, we could do that”, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.But rather than waste time in conjecture, we made our way through the rest of the business. That included a planning application regarding putting solar panels on the enormous shed which is the regional hub for The Range. Given that we’d been questioning why they weren’t required in the first place, we were hardly likely to object.The finances remain healthy, which as acting Responsible Finance Officer reassures me, although I am beginning to think that we need to think about a reserves policy going forward.We ended things reasonably promptly, and I was offered a lift back to Needham Market by Ross, who I hadn’t really had an opportunity to talk to up until then. Whilst we come from different parties, I am convinced that he merely wants to put something back into our community and he is certainly keen to take up our issues where he can.Our next meeting isn’t until May, when it will be time for the Annual Parish and Annual Parish Council Meetings. I ought to start thinking about my report, I guess…