• The European elections take place today, 23 May, and you can vote in your local polling station until 10pm.

• These close of these elections will mark the end of the period of political purdah which has, since 15 March, prevented councils or the government from making announcements which could be construed as giving an advantage to any one party during in the run up to the local council elections on 2 May and the European ones today. It’s therefore to be expected that the next few weeks will see a slew of announcements, particularly as many councils have changed administrations. Perhaps this extra three-week break has been a blessing as it would have provided an opportunity for these to be considered, and perhaps even costed correctly, before being made public.

• Newbury MP Richard Benyon makes the fair point that he is ‘bored with Brexit’. We all are, Richard. The tone of his speech, as reported in this week’s Newbury Weekly News, suggested that it was somehow being kept alive as an issue by people with nothing better to do. The reality, lest we forget, is that the whole business was caused by the hapless David Cameron allowing the referendum to happen in order to try to heal a rift in his party; and has been perpetuated by the inability of the House of Commons, which Mr Benyon himself described earlier this year as ‘dysfunctional’, to agree on anything at all. He is also quoted as saying that Brexit ‘is not going to change anyone’s life in the way like a health condition does.’ On one level that’s obviously true but it’s hardly comparing apples with apples. If it were not seen as life-changing, or nation-changing, why was it necessary to have a referendum costing about £135m and why has it occupied over one-sixth of parliament’s time since 2016?  As for trying to combat the so-called ‘project fear’ we’re now way past that point. The impact of Brexit, if any when it happens, was recently estimated by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research to be likely to cost £4bn over the next decade to the county of Oxfordshire alone. I’m sure that other figures – some higher, some lower – are available. However, it’s rare to come across any that speak of a positive effect.

• Mr Benyon was visiting Bradfield Primary School to discuss the campaign to enable Orkambi, a ‘life-changing wonder drug’ for cystic fibrosis, to be made available on the NHS. The problem, as this article from The Guardian explains, is the cost. meanwhile, this article on the BBC website looks into the claim that pharmaceutical companies are colluding, OPEC-style, to reduce supply and increases costs of some of their drugs.

• The question of the London Road Industrial Estate has received another airing in the letters pages of this week’s NWN, in which Ian Hall also makes the point that the Conservatives can’t blame all their election woes on Brexit. Any readers of Private Eye will already have seen their take on this very point in the form  of an excellent all-purpose post-election statement from any political party.

• Another letter, from the three newly-elected Wash Common Councillors, also touches on a divisive planning matter, the beleaguered Sandleford project. On reading the letter and speaking to one of its authors, there are several issues here. The first is that it appears from documents that are in the public domain but which were not the result of a debate that West Berkshire has given into pressure from the two developers – who have a long history of not being able to co-operate – to de-couple the applications. This is contrary to West Berkshire’s own policy which is that the whole site must be governed by one application; and opens up, as does the above-mentioned LRIE question, the way that planning decisions have been arrived at. 

The second point concerns how this will affect the development itself (if it happens). The question of how many access roads there should be and who should pay for them has been the subject of disagreement between the parties before and it seems unlikely that decoupling the applications are going to make this easier to resolve. There are also a host of other infrastructure issues which a development of this scale throws up. None of these are likely to be resolved to best advantage with two developers at work, with all the possibilities for unsatisfactory compromises, time-consuming disputes and the temptation for each to blame the other for anything that goes wrong. If too many of one thing or not enough of something else are built these will probably be impossible to put right.

The third point concerns the general question of the power that developers have in these situations. The government has effectively outsourced its entire home-building policy to the private sector and has left local councils with the task of trying to align the interests and demands of Whitehall, the local residents, the council’s own Local Plan and the understandable commercial ambitions of the developers. (In this they aren’t helped by wild cards like Permitted Development Rights which can result in homes being converted from commercial units over which the council has no control and which often do not satisfy the long-term housing needs of the area). However, by putting so many of its eggs in the Sandleford basket, West Berkshire has made this problem even worse. If the plan does not go ahead it will leave a massive hole in the council’s house-building targets. Is it therefore any wonder that, as appears to be the case, the developers are asking for aspects of the council’s own policy to be set aside and that the council is agreeing? This in turn establishes a dangerous precedent. There will be more on this, and LRIE, as further facts emerge. 

• Reading the Thomas the Tank Engine books as a child – and then having to endure the sic transit gloria mundi of listening to Ringo Starr narrating the stories on the videos when I had sons of my own – instilled in me the idea that diesel locomotives were the bad guys, causing further havoc and disruption on Sodor’s railway network which already seemed to have about two accidents a day. Compared to steam engines there seems nothing romantic or aesthetic about them so I was all the more surprised at the interest in the withdrawal of the high-speed trains from the West Coast mainline last weekend. You can read an article about the final journey here and another one here by local rail expert and photographer Tony Bartlett with his impressions of the new trains that have now replaced them: or see the long and informative letter in this week’s NWN from another local expert, David Canning. 

• Former West Berkshire Councillor Marcus Franks, who died last month, has been posthumously created an Honorary Alderman.

• West Berkshire’s new Council Leader was elected earlier this week, with Lynne Doherty replacing Graham Jones (who did not stand for re-election): a new executive line-up has also been appointed. Further details here.

• The animal of the week are 25 beavers: not really animals at all but members of the Hungerford Beaver Scouts who recently helped the Smarten Up Hungerford team collect discarded rubbish from various sites in the town.

• The letters pages of the Newbury Weekly News this week include, aside from the ones mentioned above, questions about the timing and impact of recent roadworks in Newbury, an attempt to close the recent climate-change debate which has been raging in this section for some weeks and praise for the current Open Studios season in the area.

• A number of good causes have received valuable support recently, including: PALS (thanks to recent clay-pigeon event); Grove Primary School (thanks to Persimmon); several Wiltshire charities (thanks to the Pewsey Vale Running Club); the Newbury Soup Kitchen (thanks to the recent quiz evenings at The Red House in marsh Benham and The Castle in Donnington).