West Hertfordshire Liberal Democrats

The Hertfordshire Liberal Democrat Councillors, who are the Opposition at County, Hall have slammed a decision by the Conservative-run administration to spend an extra £11m that the council has been given for road and footway repairs on new roads instead.

A few months ago, the government provided increased funding for highways maintenance, raising it for this year for England from £1bn to £1.5bn. Hertfordshire County Council's additional funding is just over £11m.

The Tory Council Cabinet has decided that instead of using it for what was intended by the government, the money will be spent to cover the cost of new roads at the A120, A602 and at Essex Road Bridge in East Herts. This is despite the fact that the council has over £300m in contingency funds for the major schemes like these.

This information became public during a question at Full Council last week when the Executive Member for Highways, Conservative Councillor Phil Bibby, admitted that the money was not going to be used for the purpose for which the government had allocated it.

Liberal Democrat Opposition Leader, Cllr Stephen Giles-Medhurst, who found out the facts, hit out, "This is a disgrace and an insult to both the government and residents. The government rightly understood that more needed to be spent on highway and footway maintenance and to not do so from what is claimed to be a flagship Conservative authority is an insult to ministers and to all of us who have lobbied for this extra cash."

"This money should be used to improve uneven and unsafe footways, cut back overgrown paths and cycleways and improve maintenance on our side streets. This was the government's intention. The County council has millions in reserves that it could use to support any extra road building costs - instead, it is saving it for its election year. By all means, ask the government to meet increased costs but we must put our residents first and not new roads. As usual, the Conservatives have got their priorities wrong in the green agenda."

Nick Hollinghurst, Herts County Councillor for Tring and the Villages, commented,
"In 2013, in response to the government's emphasis on encouraging Active Travel, Herts County Council drew up an Active Travel Strategy. In 2018 this became part of Hertdordshire's Local Transport Plan (LTP4). It is also as important in terms of the County's Public Health responsibilities as it is in terms of its requirement to plan for the development of our local tranport network."

"The Exec Member for Highways is seriously off message here. He is ignoring the government's request for Transport Authorities to develop Active Travel Strategies, he is undermining his own administration by deciding not to repair cycleways and footways and, more seriously, he has taken money that the government gave for one specific purpose but is defiantly deciding to spend it on another."

"Added to which," Nick concluded, "he is acting clean counter to both the spirit and intentions in the Climate Emergency Motion passed unanimously by the Council last year!"

While everyone is in favour of a greater proportion of plastic being recycled, not everyone is aware of the cost and complexity of the processes needed to achieve this. Dirty and/or mixed waste plastic has hardly any value at all and is fit only for the waste stream feed into an Energy from Waste Unit which will cost you about £90 a tonne (you pay them). At least this is cheaper than £113.15 a tonne at a landfill site (includes the Landfill Tax). On the other hand if you had clean, baled mixed bottles strapped on a pallet you might be paid £70 a tonne - and if you had clear, light blue PET bottles you might get as much as £240 a tonne.

However between the dirty mixed plastics and the clean sorted bottles lies a lot of expensive technology. The first step is to keep the bottles out of the dirty waste stream and the second is to sort that stream to give a pure product suitable to go for granulation and pass the standards for re-use for food and pharmaceutical packaging.

Governments around the world are responding to calls to increase the proportion of recycled material in plastic products. In the UK there will be a tax of £200 a tonne on plastic produced with less than 30% recycled content and in the EU there will be a tax of €800 per tonne levied per gramme on the weight of unrecycled plastic used to make the product. The EU system gives manufacturers an incentive to get as close as possible to 100% recycled, whereas the UK system just incentifies manufacturers to get over a modest threshold - thogh this will be slowly increased each year.

Where however does this recycled plastic come from? Well, the answer is that it must come from the municipal and commercial waste stream, and this is the problem.

Although there is a Norwegian company TOMRA Recycling offering a high tech system that first breaks the waste plastic into flakes. These flakes contain high amounts of PP and PE (which comes mostly from the bottle caps), PET, HDPE, LDPE, pieces of metal, PVC from remaining labels and small quantities of other contaminants.

Growing soft fruit is not easy. The plants need sunshine to grow and ripen - making sugars to provide sweetness needs lots of energy in the form of sunlight. On the other hand they need lots of water, i.e. lots of rain, so all in all that's a bit of a contradiction.

Fortunately there were alternating sunny and wet periods this year combined with relatively high temperatures. This means it has been quite a good year for soft fruit, and of course natural soft fruits in hedgerows and in the woods have also been plentiful. This of course means less predation by hungry birds - but this doesn't mean you be relaxed. You still need to defend your crops from avian thieves. In previous years we've never managed to get more than a handful of gooseberries for ourselves - the rest being stolen by the local pigeons who stripped the bushes almost bare.

So this year, because of the favourable weather - but mainly because of a birdproof cage built around the bush using wooden posts and netting left over from earlier years - we were delighted to get a crop of gooseberries weighing 12 pounds!

That's it for 2020, but today saw some quick work to dismantle the fruit cage and use the materials to go over the top of several dozen cabbage, broccoli and Brussels sprout seedlings which have now been planted out. Not a moment too soon either! The seedlings had already been pecked and torn and the have to survive until Christmas time or later if we are to get a decent amount of food from them.

This Monday, 20th July, 2020, the first trainset in an order of 5 battery hybrid passenger trains was delivered to rail and bus operator Trafnidiaeth Cymru in Wrexham to run on their Borders Line service between Wrexham in North Wales and Bidston on the Wirrall. At Bidston an easy change to Merseyrail makes for a fast and frequent service to Birkenhead and Liverpool.

In the five-step hierarchy of waste management options, immediately after Waste Prevention - the preferred option - comes Reuse, and this is what we see in action here. Reuse of rail rolling stock, especially of locomotives, is not new. However Vivarail, an engineering company now based in Southam, near Stratford-on-Avon, was set up in 2015 with the main objective of apecialising in producing and supplying economic and low-emission rebuilt passenger trainsets.

South West Railway has chosen Vivarail's Class 484 trainsets to be the basis of improved rail services on the Island Line on the Isle of Wight. These are refurbished London Underground D78 trains originally built in the 1970s and previously used on Transport for London's Northern Line. They will continue to use the existing 750 volt DC third-rail system on the island and the first of the 5 train order is expected to be delivered in September 2020 for testing.

Vivarail is now producing its Class 230 trainsets also based on London Underground D78 but from stock manufactured in the 1980s. They can be configured as battery-only with a 40 mile range, or as diesel-electric with diesel motors to keep the batteries charged and also able to supply additional motive power in addition to electric traction. Three 2-car diesel-electric trainsets have been running on the Marston Vale Line between Bletchley and Bedford, with the first having been delivered in April 2019.

The trainsets being supplied to Trafnidiaeth Cymru will be geo-fenced to ensure electric-only operation in intermediate stations and will be fitted with fully accessible toilets, power sockets, electronic passenger information, Wi-Fi, bike racks and air conditioning. The Borders Line a hilly and demanding route and winning this order this is a significant achievement for Vivarail. It is expected that this type of refurbished and refitted passenger train will provide a cost-effective way to retain and extend branch line and lightly-used routes as part of the "reverse Beeching" aspiration in so many localities across the UK.

Partly based on an article in the Deeside.com to whom acknowledgement for the picture is also due.

Yes, folks, when I stood for Parliament for the Hemel Hempstead constituency for the SDP/Liberal Alliance in 1983 rolling out fibre broadband across the country was one of our flagship policies. Shirley Williams espoused it as her personal crusade and got a detailed three-page article in the Economist, a business affairs weekly established in London in1843. The Financial Times was similarly enthusiastic.

Shortly before that I had visited the big BT telecommunications research establishment at Martlesham Heath in Suffolk to help discuss optical fibre manufacture quality control - everybody there was very proud of the way they were leading in the technical implementation of fibre optic signalling and communications.

But alas, UK declared war on Argentina and the Conservatives won the election of 1983 on a wave of patriotic fervour and among a great many other things, BT, which had been made independent of the Post Office in 1981, was privatised in the following year in 1984.

The Conservative government, then as now, failed to see the potential, decided to leave whatever fibre optics were to "the market", and the UK lead in this field was lost. Only large specialist customers were sought and for the next decade the fastest method of tranmitting large quantities of dater remained a courier driving along the motorway network with a large hard disk strapped to his back.

Despite the hard times of the covid-19 pandemic, Tring's Friday Charter Market, first established under a Royal Charter from Edward II in 1315, has kept going.

Tring was, apparently, also granted the right to hold a Fair every year lasting 10 days and starting on 29th June, the Feast of St Peter and St Paul.

This 10-Day Fair, seems at some time to have fallen into abeyance, which is not surprising considering the amount of stamina you would need to keep a fair going for 10 days. What with all the drinking and naughtiness which was customary at mediaeval fairs, agricultural productivity would have been seriously compromised, with a corresponding dent made in the profits of the Lord of the Manor.

It would appear then, that good manorial fiscal governance made common cause with the advocacy of piety and the upholding of moral virtues leading to the 10-Day Fair being more honored in the breach than in its observance. High Summer in Tring calmed down and 29th June is now celebrated in a more wholesome manner as the Patronal Day of the Parish Church.

However, be that as it may (or may not) have been, the Charter Market on Fridays proved a steady earner down the centuries and stood the test of time.

And it was certainly in full swing a couple of days ago, now in its 705th year.

Business was brisk, with well-separated queues, social distancing respected and in a tenth of the time that shopping now takes in a big supermarket.

So don't let our good market and hardworking traders down - shop at the Friday Market, save time, support small businesses and help get our local economy back on its feet!

And that's not all, on every second and fourth Saturday of the month we also have the Tring Farmers Market. Next one on 25th July, 2020.

Every Principal Council should set up structures to ensure the actions and decisions of the Council Executive and the policies of the Council itself are able to be scrutinised by councillors and by members of the public.

Dacorum Borough Council has set up three Scrutiny Committees to enable this process this be implemented. The Membership of the Committees must be politically proportionate but the Chairs and Vice-Chairs can be from any political party among the members.

Since May 2019 the compostion of Dacorum Borough Council has been 19 Liberal Democrats (the Opposition) and 32 Conservatives (the Administration). The Committees all have 13 members and the composition by party is 5 Lib Dems and 8 Conservatives (there are no DBC councillors from any other parties). This is the correct proportion of 37% Liberal Democrats. However across these three Committees there are 6 Committee Chairs and Vice-Chairs - and here is the problem. Of the 6 only one (a Vice-Chair) is a Liberal Democrat i.e. only 17%.

All Councillors have to agree to abide by the 7 "Nolan Principles" of Conduct in Public Life. The two most relevant are as below
4. Accountability

Well, we all like sweet, succulent fruit picked when ripe and eaten fresh, but soft fruits are not the easiest crops to look after.

You have to make a careful start and plan well ahead. It's unlikely you'll get a good crop from from bushes in their first year of planting. Once the plants have settled in though, you could expect a good tasty crop if the weather's been kind. You need enough sun and of course enough rain.

Then, if you've got a good crop developing, you have to defend it from the birds. They are up and about shortly after they've done their dawn chorus thing and that, in high summer means, 5 o'clock. If they spot a tasty meal in the morning they will return in force mid-afternoon and they can strip your bushes before you realise what's happening. Because of this, a cage (with the currants on the inside and the birds on the outside!) ls essential for the survival of your crop.

These days, however, kits of ready-made fruit cages in modular form are available at garden centres or on-line - but at a price. When I worked out that this would cost well over £60 for our modest patch of fruit bushes I set about salvaging some lengths of cheap netting from previous years. This was draped over a sort of home- made cage built from lengths of 2 by 1 left over from a project two years ago. A thing of beauty it was not, but it did the job.

The ground level defence was supplied on two sides by some stout chicken wire, which is in any case very necessary to keep the deer, muntjac and rabbits away from the vegetables.

Fingers crossed, but so far this year we've lost very little to the predations of the surrounding wildlife - though nothing keeps the dormice away. Let's hope they get enough beechmast and apples to distract them from our vegetable patch!

Of course if you're located in a town the risks are less. On an allotment the best defence against having your crops devoured by passing birds or mammals would appear to be the simple strategy of avoiding choosing a plot on the outside, and trying to get nearer the centre!

However, whether in your own garden if you have the space, or on an allotment or a half-plot if you have the opportunity and wish to grow your own food on a larger scale, it's well worth the effort! Not only does fresh home-grown food taste delicious, but it's an enjoyable hobby and provides lots of good healthy exercise. Go for it if you can!

Pix by Rosemarie

Shunting locomotives are the less-than-glamorous diesel-powered machines that carry out the hum-drum work of moving rail wagons around to make up trains or for shifting heavy loads around extensive heavy industrial sites. Most people have probably seen the squat 6-wheel shunting engines which have served marshalling yards, docks and factories across Britain since 1952.

Most are now over 50 years old, expensive to maintain and spare parts are now becoming difficult to source. In addition they are noisy for machines that often operate out of doors and at night. They do not comply with modern emission standards and large diesel engines cannot easily be switched on and off so they run idle in between movements, wasting fuel and adding to pollution and noise.

Electric power means simple traction motors and, with battery storage, a hybrid locomotive can be operated with a small, quiet, cleaner diesel engine delivering continuous recharge power and compliant with the latest EU Stage V emission and efficiency standards. So batteries are now getting everywhere as companies move to cut costs and economies get slowly greener.

Clayton Equipment Ltd (CEL), based in Burton-on-Trent, is now establishing itself in the niche market of hybrid shunters. CEL first came into existence in 1920 as Clayton Wagons Ltd, a subsidiary of Clayton & Shuttleworth (founded 1842) but emerged under its present name in 1931 as a private company with one employee and two directors - the employee and his wife! They successfully built up a business trading in goods and spare parts for Clayton Wagon's former customers in agriculture and manufacturing. After WWII they acted as agents for International Combustion Ltd who eventually took them over and and both companies ended up as past of Rolls Royce Group. They were floated off by RRG in March 2005 have now become a successful independent company specialising in the conversion of old diesel-powered locomotives and in manufacturing new diesel-battery electric hybrid locomotives for a variety of applications.

They are currently working on contracts for five 90 tonne, battery hybrid shunters with 56kW diesel rechargers for Tata Steel, Port Talbot. These will be the largest locomotives built in the UK since 2003. Power is delivered by the traction battery and 416 kW maintenance-free, high torque electric motors. The need to deliver 2,500 tonne loads of molten iron safely across the Port Talbot steelworks, operating on gradients of up to 1 in 60 requires high torque and high track adhesion. In these conditions the weight of the locomotive needs to be high and this led to a design based on standard lead-acid accumulators which provide the necessary weight, are cheaper than Li-ion batteries and are easier to replace and recycle.

Two similar 80 tonne shunters from CEL have been also been ordered for Sellafield Ltd for their nuclear site in Cumbria.

Pic from Clayton Equipment Ltd