You will have to excuse me as this is my first go at my blog. So, if I slip into jargon; if I ramble on about things you’re not interested in; or, even worse, if it’s just yawningly dull -tell me!
This week has been a really short one work-wise as it’s been half term and I’ve been at home most of the week with my family. I did spend a bit of time in two of our local market towns – Bakewell and Matlock – and I can never turn off from thinking about how all of the traders are doing throughout the recession. Matlock is a very functional town and whilst it serves a few affluent areas there are many less well off areas too. Many people in Matlock rely on its engineering industries, and I think these are being hit hard. So, the charity shops seemed pretty busy in Matlock. Bakewell, by contrast has worked hard to retain more of a quality edge to its shopping and there still seemed to be lots of visitors during the week. But, traders in Bakewell also seem hit by lower spending with one trader I spoke to saying he was 25% down in the months before Christmas and 35% in the New Year. I see that Sinclairs, a fine and traditional China shop of the old variety is shutting up shop. One of the most practical things we can all to to ensure our carbon footprint is kept low is to shop locally and especially by supporting our smaller, traditional local traders.
Back in the office, the few days I have been here have been dominated by much talk of the way the regions affect our lives in the National Park. Earlier in the week, David Cameron launched the Conservative policy on regions, promising to do away with many of the regional bodies that set strategy and decide matters. This week big decisions are being made by all of the political leaders in the Sheffield City Region about how closely they will work in future. There’s a tenson here about whether in future the emphasis will be at county council level, or with councils working together in city regions or at regional level. What has all this got to do with a National Park? I often ask this as I sit through long meetings in distant places like Rotherham and Nottingham or when I’m ploughing through jargon-riddled papers. In reality, many of the big decisions about matters that affect the National Park are made in these far-off places. This was brought home to me as I walked up Cressbrook Dale this afternoon with Richard Leafe, Chief Executive of the Lake District National Park. His Chair, the affable and well-connected Bill Jefferson, had just been in a meeting where all the councils in the North West of England had agreed not to fund the Mottram/Hollingworth/Tintwistle Bypass in the regional budgets for 2012-2015. As anyone who has followed the work of the National Park in recent years, will know that this scheme has been a major threat to the moorlands in the Longdendale Valley, at the heart of what the National Park is about. So, maybe I will continue to keep an eye on all of the alphabet soup of strategies and regional quangos, as well as keeping an eye on what Gordon Brown and David Cameron plan to do with them all in the long-term too.
