2019

Chairman’s Report- Orby AGM

Firstly, may I welcome you to this Parish AGM. Since our last meeting the Council has met 10 times to discuss matters pertaining to the village, take decisions on planning applications and deal with the more mundane matters of potholes and fly tipping. Mundane they may be, but vital for keeping our village safe and attractive.

I would like to firstly thank our Clerk, Christine Newton for her service to us as a council. I would like to thank our councillors, John - our Vice Chairman, Vanessa, Sandy, Chris and Allison. It is important to hear views from them as we try and build a consensus on how our village should progress.

I would particularly like to pay tribute to our diligent and very hard working District Councillor, Alan Vassar who because of a recent operation cannot be with us tonight. He has provided sterling support and guidance over the last four years and 1 know we will miss his presence at our meetings. He has decided to stand down in May and we will no doubt have a new District councillor to represent us.

I would of course like to thank those members of the public who join us at our monthly meetings to raise issues, ask questions and generally make sure we are working for them.

I would like to remind the public that all of us devote our time and effort without any reward and unlike MPs who are well rewarded we give our time because we love our community.

Despite the best efforts of Alan and our own representations we have largely been ignored by the District council on planning issues. We now have a Travellers site on our boundary, now owned by ELDC with a donkey on site, which we can assume received a free transfer to ELDC as part of the deal. This council vigorously opposed it. ELDC have continued to ignore our representations on Caravan and Log cabin sites within and on the boundary to our Parish. We did manage to intervene on land adjacent to Catchwater Meadow after illegal materials were dumped onto the site and the Owner has been forced to fully cleanse the site of that waste. That has been done and as a result LCC has returned the site to ELDC to determine planning matters. The application for further development is now in at Manby.

At the end of the day Orby is an unsustainable village and therefore all development should be refused. Our sustainability score has reduced further after the closure of our only Pub and we do not meet the requirements for infill housing. The district council has a duty to be consistent in these matters and they clearly, are not.

We have had a number of quite serious incidents of fly tipping in and around our village. These have all been reported to East Lindsey and are cleaned up accordingly. I am sad to say that despite our representations and those of Cllr Vassar we still have some disgraceful and unkempt sites within our village. Enforcement at ELDC has failed this community badly and I will be recommending to the council that we formally report ELDC to the Local Government ombudsman to seek redress.

At our last AGM we discussed Speed signs for the Village.After a year of discussion we are now close to getting these installed. This has only been possible by the very kind generosity of LJ Fairburn and Son, who produce the exclusive blue eggs in our village. We are in the process of invoicing them for their very generous donation and once received we will place the order and purchase these for the Community and get them installed.