• The trend in English football is to scrap extra time and replays for cup games. With Brexit, the tendency is otherwise. Many have long been calling for a replay: the Foreign Secretary has recently admitted that extra time might be needed. I suppose it might come down to penalties. If I were the PM, I wouldn’t care to pick who to choose to take them. Some like to shoot too far to the right and others too far to the left, while the problem with shots down the centre is that they’re easier to save. In addition, the other side is able to field 27 goalkeepers…

• As could have been predicted, there’s a fair amount of coverage (two articles on p4 and two letters on p16) in this week’s Newbury Weekly News on the subject of the London Road Industrial Estate. The first article mainly concerns some questions posed at a recent WBC executive meeting which resulted in Councillor Hilary Cole claiming on several occasions that the council had acted responsibly in the matter; the second concerns the newspaper’s attempts, so far unsuccessful (due to the request being, as the council put it, ‘manifestly unreasonable’), to obtain copies of the relevant correspondence under an FoI request. 

Three points strike me about this. Firstly, WBC councillors seem to be going out of their way to stress that the recent judgement against the council was of a purely technical nature. However, the Court of Appeal arrived at its judgements for a number of reasons, including the publishing by the Council of a VEAT notice that ‘did not say all that it should’ and which was ‘not transparent’ and the fact that there was ‘a procurement of development that did not undergo the requisite procurement procedure.’ These seem rather fundamental points to me.

Secondly, it could be argued that the money and time so far spent on the LRIE, which includes entering into a commercial agreement which the Court of Appeal has declared invalid, does not amount to ‘responsible’. The sums involved go far beyond the £600,000 or so incurred in legal and other costs and include the cost of the access road, which the original developers had agreed to include in its scheme. The question thus remains as to why this aspect of the work was excluded from the commercial agreement with St Modwens. This would certainly have made the matter a clear procurement contract from the outset: in fact, the Court of Appeal judged that it was effectively one anyway and so should have been handled in a different way, a point which the official replies seem rather to gloss over. Dr Julie Wintrup, one of whose questions to Councillor Cole was on this point, observed after the meeting that ‘a council that says it wants to engage the public seems to be pretty irritated by that same public when it asks questions and doesn’t simply accept the first pre-rehearsed reply.’ 

Thirdly, as two letters to the NWN this week point out, it seems both odd and unfortunate that the committee at WBC looking into this matter should be chaired by one of the councillors who was, the correspondents claim, deeply involved in the decision-making. I cast no aspersions but this must surely be an impossible role to undertake and is almost a definition of conflict of interests. To make matters even more complicated, as this might now not be fully examined until after the elections on 2 May it’s possible that the composition of that committee might then have changed.

• Representatives from the Thames Valley Berkshire Local Enterprise Partnership were in town last week to see ‘seven key projects which will deliver (sic) vital improvements to the town over the next five years.’  Click here for more.

• According to this report, most local councils in England have overspent their special-needs budget this year. The combined excess is over £320m, an average of about £2.6m per council. The government pledged an extra £250m over two years in December and the matter will, apparently, be looked at in the next spending review.

• And sticking with the alleged disparity between supply and demand in our public services, the Chairman of the Thames Valley Police Federation has claimed that the 13.2% rise in the police precept announced by the Commissioner last week will do little more than let the force ‘stand still’: the £24m that this will raise will be partly offset by £15.1m of savings which TVP has been told to make over then next four years. One of the main challenges is officer retention: TVP currently has the highest staff turnover rate in the country and is also currently 59 officers, and 44 PCSOs, short of its target. See also the Hungerford & district section below.

• West Berkshire Council is conducting a review of its Polling Districts and Places – local council elections are coming up on 2 May.

• The Beast from the East seems to be on its way in the form of snow and icy weather: by dusk this evening, most of the area may well have turned white. Take care on the roads in particular. (Of course, it may be coming from the west, not the east, but it’s both a better rhyme and more in keeping with current opinion to regard bad things as coming from the direction of Siberia rather than the Azores. Readers of the Daily Express will, of course, have had this predicted more or less every week since the clocks went back. From my occasional glances at its headlines, I’m not aware that this newspaper writes about anything else apart from bad weather and Brexit.)

• If you have an overdue library book, the library service is having a two-day amnesty on Friday 22 and Saturday 23 February.

• If you want to keep your eye on how your local school is doing, the latest league tables have been published – click here. The accompanying article makes depressing reading for anyone hoping for signs that the life chances of disadvantage pupils were showing any rapid signs of improvement.

• A new regional pilot announced to boost mental health support in West Berkshire – click here for details.

• As we predicted, the Police Commissioner, Anthony Stansfeld, has decided to raise the police precept for 2019-20 by 13.2%, about £24 per household per year. This will, he claims, avoid ‘unacceptable reductions in resources’. Click here to read the Police and Crime Plan for the Thames Valley 2017-21 which the PCC’s office has prepared.

• Click here for more information on the forthcoming West Berkshire Lottery.

• The letters pages of the Newbury Weekly News this week include: the two above-mentioned letters on the subject on London Road; criticism of the departure of Sovereign Housing’s HQ from Newbury; some thoughts about whether Tories can also be environmentalists; more on the red-kite debate; and a picture of an enormous dog next to a tiny dog which could be either his friend or his lunch.

• A number of good causes have received valuable support recently, including: British Legion (thanks to Marion Walker); grew Little princess trust (thanks to Emily Brewer and Matilda Edwards); a wide range of local groups (thanks to the Co-op’s Local Community Fund); Recovery in Mind (thanks to the Big Lottery’s reaching Communities Fund).