LTC Points of View

Letter from: Ex Leigh Town Council councillor, Damian O’Boyle, Leigh.

SIR, I appreciate that this is a rarity of a letter, but please may I congratulate the Chair of Leigh Town Council Bernard Arscott, Deputy Chair McCurdy and all their council allies.

As a former Leigh Town councillor I was not very good at all. Due to work pressures, family priorities and a number of surgeries, my attendance and input to the council was very limited.

In fact, I would go as far to say, I was personally very concerned that I might be considered the worst Leigh Town Council councillor ever!

I need not have worried.

Thanks to the excellent work of Bernard and his co-conspirators there are now so many ahead of me that can steal that crown, I don’t think I’d even register in the top ten worst councillors these days.

Bravo and thanks Bernard et al, keep up the good bad work!

 

Letter from: James Preston, Leigh resident.

SIR, having attended a number of the Leigh town council meetings recently, I feel compelled to share my dissatisfaction with the service being offered by those in charge of the town council.

The arrogance displayed by the people running Leigh Town Council, at the recent town hall meetings, local press and online forums is astonishing.

Imagine a locally based customer centric business offering a terrible service, ignoring the problems, telling their clients to be quiet in a public meeting, to cease and desist from complaining, to not offer solutions to complaints, to accuse their vocal customers of bullying.

They would lose customers and ultimately go out of business.

That is exactly what we are witnessing from the majority of our current local town councillors.

Customers are empowered through the press, internet and social media, and rightly have a very loud voice, aligned with the ability to share poor service across many platforms.

“Our” local town council is not and should not be immune from the same levels of public scrutiny and accountability.

We are the Councils customers. We want to help. We want a functioning, professional Leigh Town Council that we can again be proud of.

We are highlighting our concerns, complaining about poor service, but are not receiving acknowledgement or reassurances that they know what they are doing.

A well run and effective business would work with their customers, try and understand their concerns, offer solutions and fix the problems.

Using online forums, face to face and town meetings, they should be listening, attentively, with a compassionate ear, planning to improve their offerings, accept that improvements must be made and communicating with the residents across all platforms.

We need our town council to think and act like a modern day customer focused business, not a platform for old school politics.

Customer service does not get much worse. This arrogance highlights to me that we are not worthy of their time. We should not stand for it. They are there to support us, that fact must not be forgotten.

Letter from: Valerie Morgan, Past Chairman of Leigh Town Council.

SIR. a past chairman of Leigh Town Council, Hilary Davison, coined the motto ‘ Good for Leigh’ and since then that is what all councillors have tried to be.

That is until the current group of Conservative councillors, who seem to be doing the opposite. When will they stop wasting our money, reinstate our hard working Town Clerk and work for the good of our lovely town?

 

Letter from: Coun Alan Hart, Leigh Town Council.

SIR Coun Martin Terry speaks vociferously on Leigh Town Council under the banner heading of ‘Town Council Is No Place For Part Politics’, Leigh News December 12. As a Totally Independent Leigh Town Councillor I fully associate myself with his statements.

Regrettably a degree of apathy resulted in the nine un-opposed Tory candidates being ‘elected’ in May, an inevitable outcome of a lack of alternative candidates from the general public.

As Coun Terry points out, this is the usual process where a single candidate stands, but it can hardly be called democratic. Our process depends upon members of the public being willing to stand and the Tory Party took full advantage of this. Hopefully the same scenario will not occur next time.

As to our erstwhile MP, she has been contacted and absolves herself of any responsibility, stating that it would be ‘deeply inappropriate’ to involve herself, disregarding the clear disrepute the shambolic actions of the Tory ‘group’ on LTC brings to her Party.

I can only reiterate that headline by stating that party members should be an irrelevance within Leigh Town Council and repeat my request that party councillors should leave their rosettes at the door and declare independence as far as LTC is concerned, perhaps then we could regain some consensus?

Meanwhile we welcome comments from the public, a support group has been formed and can hold the erroneous party members feet to the fire! Seasons greetings to those of any and all political colours.

 

Letter from: Jane Lovell, five years press secretary of LSAG and then chairman, Sandleigh Road, Leigh.

SIR, re the article by Martin Terry about the road to the west.

While I agree that Mike King did many things for the area I do think that the Leigh seafront action group deserve at least a mention for the road to the west having been taken off the Essex council plan.

LSAG was formed at a packed public meeting in 1970 chaired by Mike King to fight the proposals to turn Jocelyn beach into a car park.

A committee of twelve operated for about ten years producing a massive campaign involving motorcades, boat sail pasts, public meetings, petitions and the notorious green car stickers seen on every one in two cars in Leigh, with the slogans changing every month.

Eventually the beach, cinder path and old town were saved, when the road came off the map.  The action group still thrived in fights re the countryside park, the oil refinery on Canvey, the Boris airport in the estuary and laterally the fight to stop the new hospice being built on Leigh cliffs.

The action group still exists with its four members all over 90 except for me. We have eight pounds in the bank.

I think we at least deserve a mention for 15 years of hard work and hope that others a bit younger will take up the fight to protect our seafront and countryside in the future.

 

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