OPINION: Letters to the editor of the Newbury Weekly News
The point is that this noisy party was illegal
I did have a laugh when I read one of your commenters branding the sleep-deprived residents in south Newbury ‘precious’ for complaining about an illegal rave Newbury Weekly News, September 11).
Regardless to whether the enjoyment of a couple of hundred teenagers at the expense of tens of thousands of local residents is, on balance, a fair trade off, the point stands that the event was illegal.
Perhaps they can petition our local MP to introduce a Parliamentary Bill which would make extremely loud, all-night, music events in unannounced locations legal?
I’m sure it will have resounding support across the country…
George Paterson
Newbury
We must cherish emergency services
I read on the front page of NWN about Bharati Sakha Newbury (the local branch of a national Hindu organisation) thanking the emergency services.
My recent contact with the emergency services started with me sat in a kindly neighbour’s chair, waking up some considerable time later with paramedics around me.
I don’t know how they put me on the stretcher as the next time I woke up I was in an ambulance en route to the Royal Berks Hospital.
My point being we must value the emergency services and not hand them and the NHS over to some profit-driven insurer as a certain populist politician has suggested.
Just remember what happened to the water companies.
I speak as someone who retired in my fourth decade in insurance.
Ian Hall
Ashampstead
So many questions on black bin collections
On Wednesday, September 10, I chanced upon page 15 of the August edition of St Mark’s (Cold Ash) Parish News: “[Council black bin] collection calendars ... will be delivered to households between 25 August and 5 September.”
Nothing received here.
Friday, September 12: Checking the WBC website re an anticipated ‘soil conditioner giveaway’ this month (now October) and wondering exactly when the three-week schedule would start after last collection here on the 10th, I clicked on a link to find the next collection date and was totally surprised that it will be next Saturday, September 20, an intermediate collection to avoid a longer than three-week gap.
Later same day: I tried unsuccessfully to contact my councillor by phone to ask whatever was going on as the calendar I had just found on the web was very unhelpfully and includes Christmas period dates that are then admitted as going to be changed.
Why can’t those necessary changes be worked out now?
Then I discovered my poor overworked councillor, already on the executive and usefully on Cold Ash PC as well, has been seconded to Hermitage PC because the latter is short of a quorum, by just one, so why have two WBC councillors been seconded?
My executive member has enough to do and has a commendable 91 per cent meeting attendance record since May 2023 whereas their Conservative opposition colleague, also seconded, has an attendance record of just below 80 per cent.
No wonder the former was unavailable.
One reason long-time Conservative supporters such as myself voted Lib Dem in 2023 and 2024 was because the Conservative Party, both locally and nationally, had become the nasty party.
Locally the Lib Dems now seem nice people but lacking in common sense.
The accompanying website text about the black bin changes is just patronising, including comments like fill your car as much as you can if we have forced you to make a trip to a refuse centre, which by the way you should make if passing (if the booking system has an available slot at such a time).
Who wouldn’t take as much as possible?
Oh, and if you collect loaded dog poo bags, why not keep them sealed in the garden until the night before a collection?
I can also do without comments like telling me to change my shopping habits to survive a 33 per cent reduction in black bin capacity.
Sorry council, mind your own business.
Having said all this, the change will not impact me one iota because I create minimal black bin waste, so little in fact that last year I decided not to put my bin out for the penultimate pre-Christmas collection as it was almost empty and missed receiving the leaflet advising the Christmas/New Year alterations and then totally missed a January collection because I miscalculated the week all returned to normal.
What I am interested in is what are households that already max out on recycling, have almost full current bins and no car to do?
On this the council is strangely silent.
What is fundamentally annoying is that the mooted £150,000pa saving is trivial and what should have been done is a programme to address the, amazing to me, 20+per cent of black bin content that is recyclable food waste.
Ninety-nine per cent of my minimal food waste, almost all vegetable peelings, goes on my compost heap.
What are people putting in the black bin?
If this black bin waste element could be significantly reduced, would we not be close to whatever the Government target is that if not reached soon will result in a financial penalty?
I rest my case.
Julian Waghorn
Bucklebury Alley
Do I need a dictionary to read the paper?
It has occurred to me that in every edition of the paper there aught to be a dictionary section.
I am not a wordsmith and often have to check what a word means. Opprobrium?
Then there is also the context of a word and the use of different words and phrases, possibly meaning the same thing, perhaps, so there is less repetition in an article.
Is penetrative sexual activity, with a minor, the same as rape?
Can the word rape only be used where it is a homo-sapiens being attacked and a penis is the weapon?
Similarly, when a piece is run stating numbers an explanation of how the numbers come about would be helpful.
What made the difference between 2.24, 2.43 and 2.60 in the hospital scores?
Do they get a .05 for a tin roof and .08 for an asphalt roof?
Then we are into a dictionary again for ‘asphalt’!
It could become very cumbersome.
I think only computers will ever understand GCSE grading scores, when you can get a 6 for a subject but then discover they took a ‘basic’ paper.
Whereas, if they took a different grade of paper they might have only scored 4.
Does it make a mockery of it all?
To shorten the list, as Roy Bailey and Roy Tubb said, Americanisms should just be banned.
Gotten and diaper being the worst but going into the EE and Vodafone shops and being told you need to change your woodworking tool to get a better wireless signal is ludicrous.
Perhaps having a ‘More or Less’ (BBC Radio 4) style article, headed ‘The detail beneath the headlines’ every week would untangle and address the queries?
Ms Durber
Thatcham
Why local government must raise more funds
Regarding local government reform, the only sensible solution for Berkshire would be for Slough to become a London borough and for the five Berkshire unitaries to become one county unitary.
Representing some 750,000 Berkshire residents, such a council would wield some clout and be a force to be reckoned with.
Merging West Berkshire (a unitary council) with the Vale of White Horse and South Oxon (both districts) does not strike me as practical, while arguing whether Pangbourne should go into Reading or not is akin to re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.
The elephant in the room, which is not being addressed, is the financing of local government.
I passionately believe in democracy and local government but you have to give councils the powers to raise the money needed to run the services they are required to deliver.
They can then be called to account at election time.
That is patently not the case now.
Over the years I have watched central government take financial powers away from local government and then require councils to provide more and more services on the back of government financing.
As the demand for such services has increased faster than the amount of grant supplied, increasing numbers of local authorities are being driven into bankruptcy.
The present position is a real mess and rectifying it will be very difficult.
The first party to recognise this and come forward with a viable solution will gain my vote at the next election.
Clive Williams
Pangbourne Road, Upper Basildon
