CLLR NEVILLE WAFFLE WRITES

CRUMBRIA: 09/05/2025: EXCLUSIVE

The Chronic’s Secret Councillor “Neville Waffle” is fed up with regeneration procrastination and a lack of economic vibrancy.

Matters Arising: Talking Bollards

By Cllr Neville Waffle

You’ll be thrilled to hear that we’ve got another strategic regeneration masterplan for one of our “service centres” (towns) on the go. Operation Rearrange The Street Furniture.

The Plan is stuck somewhere in the pipes of the Town Hall between the Community Wealth Making department and Economic Vibrancy/Social Prescribing.

A consultant expert in Town Planning has been involved. He famously kept being late to meetings after getting lost in the one-way system. Let’s call his firm ReGenesis; specialists in community-led innovation.

He’s regenerated a lot of words. I’ve read at least four variations of the same Plan now — each version has been in slightly different font with the photos moved around or with more buzzwords added.

Revitalising the civic offer with a range of amenities for a range of diverse users using a range of ambitious and aspirational placemaking techniques.

Multi-use hubs with dynamic wayfinding. It’s a community-led strategy which involves consulting a small fraction of the local populace extensively then ignoring them.

I think this plan has been talked about since about 2021. Talking bollards, I call it. The Council officers call it a living strategy document.

It’s a glossy PDF with photos of various diverse communities partipating in “active travel” around a homogenised town centre that nobody recognises. There are next to no cars in the artist impressions and when this was persistently brought up by one Member they were cast out to social Siberia. She was last seen muttering about “Parking Provision.”

We’re not allowed to notice that the people in the photos don’t look like the majority of people who live around here and that’s all I’m going to say on that point. Let’s just say some of our service centre users are more likely to be found queued up outside the precinct sucking vapes on their mobility scooters and arguing with the pigeons than pedalling a tandem in straw hats.

Community vibrancy.

Nothing has been placed anywhere. Unless you mean that they’re talking about moving some planters that have become a cigarette dump and are planning some vivid posters of artisan pop-up businesses on the boarded-up windows of the closed down shops.

There’s talk of money from this pot and that pot when they keep saying we haven’t got one to wee in. A key worker, Julie, fount of all Council finances, has reduced her working hours now so no one knows which drive certain spreadsheets are kept on.

I miss Julie and her cheery “hokey cokeys”.

The all-party working group keeps falling out because of Party politics. It’s known as the Not Working Working Group in some corridors.

Don’t even get me started on this business of Members switching parties. One minute they’re Labour, next they’re Indie but aligned with Castro. Or my favourite “I’m politically fluid right now and non-affiliated – pending certain conversations.”

I fear that by the time this plan is redrafted, reconsulted and run past legal & finance, I’ll be six foot under and the big bus stop will still stink of wee and weed.