Credit where credit is due

In the latest Labour flier (‘Your Local Voice’) distributed to Milverton area residents, Councillor Jerry Weber claims that ‘at last we have come to an agreement that I hope will be good for residents’ and that ‘after a planning committee meeting on Tuesday [January 6], we now have an agreement ... which I hope will satisfy the needs of residents and the future of Hybrid Arts on the site [Riverside]’.

As one of the people who helped to coordinate the responses from local residents, I am completely unaware that any Labour councillors had significant input into the many hours of communication and discussion that went into the compromise.

Credit for that - and for related work helping to strengthen relationships between local residents and other Riverside tenants - should go to Councillor Bill Gifford (Lib Dem), who advised and supported the residents, and to the large number of district council officers, who both advised LAMP (the actual applicants) about ways forward and brokered the eventual compromise.

This was not a party political issue, but credit should go where it is due.

Councillor Weber is anyway a member of the planning committee, which considered the application, so presumably could not have had a particular interest in the case - or he would have had to excuse himself from the vote, which he did not.

David Wright, via email