The Battle For Canvey Island Town Council

OVER THE COURSE of the next three months, the Canvey Beat will be examining the six Canvey Island battlegrounds in the lead-up to the live public debates to be held on this Blog in April, and the Town Council elections in May. During that time, six feature articles will be published, providing a brief snapshot of each individual ward’s main features, and the issues confronting its residents, as Castle Point Borough Council prepares to implement its program of spending cuts.

Several readers have written-in since Monday, when the Canvey Beat first published details of how to become a Parish Councillor, expressing surprise at the number of areas in which Town and Parish Councils have powers to improve residents’ lives – and expressing their anger at Canvey Island Town Council’s apparent unwillingness to use those powers for the benefit of the community at large.

In particular, many queried why CIIP Town Councillors had taken to grand-standing and criticising CPBC in the Echo over such issues as local vandalism; public lavatories; traffic calming; litter; street cleaning; footpaths and local youth facilities when they have the powers to solve such problems themselves.

Here is a list of those individual powers that readers found so surprising:-

• The provision and maintenance of community transport schemes
• Traffic calming measures
• Local youth projects
• Tourism activities
• Leisure facilities
• Car parks
• Village greens
• Public lavatories
• Litter bins
• Street lighting
• Street cleaning
• Burial grounds
• Allotments
• Bus shelters
• Commons
• Open spaces
• Footpaths
• Bridleways, and
• Crime reduction measures

It is these basic powers, and how they might be used to improve residents’ lives in each of Canvey Island’s six wards, which the Canvey Beat will be addressing in its articles – and it is hoped that Canvey Beat readers will continue providing their own ideas and observations by emailing this Blog’s News Desk; submitting a comment on this post; or contributing - by name or anonymously - via the STOP PRESS feature. (Anonymous comments are not published to the STOP PRESS column; but their contents are still read).

From your letters and comments, it is becoming increasingly apparent that many residents feel conned by the CIIP’s claim to be ‘independent,’ and now see that word in its title as simply having been a means of ensuring its members could gain control of Canvey Island Town Council – misleading residents into believing that they were not voting for a political party and misleading genuine independents into believing they needed to fight a Parish Council election under a political banner to maximise their vote.

Please keep your comments coming-in – and look-out for those feature articles. With enough contributions they will provide individual Town Council candidates with a list of issues that need solving – and Castle Point Borough Council with a good idea of the way cuts could impact individual lives.

But perhaps, most importantly, they might form a foundation for the debates to decide how our new Town Council can work with the Borough and Essex County Council to alleviate residents’ hardship and improve local conditions over the coming years…