Bi-monthly report of Stutton Parish Council chair

I was delighted to be elected as Chair of the Parish Council at the meeting in May and I pay tribute to our outgoing chair, Darren Cooper, who after twelve years service as a councillor and six of those as Chair will be taking a well earned rest from the Parish Council duties. We also have a new Vice-chair, Emma Woollard.

For the May meeting I had prepared terms of reference for a Road Safety Review for Stutton. These were agreed and a project team will now be assembled to fully investigate all road safety issues and unreasonable risks to our communities and gain a better understanding of the exact problems and identify whether measures not already taken would be likely to reduce these risks. Although the team will consider speed this is certainly not the only issue. There are particular concerns near the Primary School – so parked cars making it difficult to cross roads and signs to alert drivers when children are actually present will be of equal importance. Our team will be two Parish Councillors,  representatives from the school and Community Speed Watch and  expert professional advice from a Community Liaison Engineer, Suffolk County Highways.

Over the next six months or so your Parish Council will be very busy on your behalf. As well as the road safety review we will be designing a Disaster Recovery Plan and responding to the emerging Strategic Housing and Economic Land Availability Assessment ( that’s a bit of a mouth full – we call it SHELAA!) This is the next step after the recent “call for sites” exercise when the sites for possible development are subject to their first assessment.

Can you help? We are now advertising to Co-opt a new Parish Councillor. Maybe you could join our team?

Or maybe you can’t commit to being a councillor but have some skills to help us such as IT, website maintenance, project management or similar. Why not come along to one of our meetings at 7.30pm on the second Monday of every month. See what is done on your behalf and even make any comment or let us have your views on any subject.

As well as the longer term issues with which we are grappling, we have since our last report in Roundabout Stutton, organised and completed a “litter pick”, funded replacement pads for the defibrillator in the old telephone kiosk and scrutinised and commented on planning applications for the Almshouses and a change of conditions for an extension at Honeysuckle, Larksfield Road, to ensure “Dark Skies Mitigation”.