Medway’s Network North bonanza
Plus Rehman's office gets egged, Rochester High St camera war escalates, and last call for our PCC debate
The government is giving Medway Council £401,000 in previously earmarked HS2 funding to repair our roads. Medway Council says they need £50m, which is rather more. Just what can be done about our very potholed roads? Further down, we have news of the office of Gillingham and Rainham MP Rehman Chishti being egged, an escalation in the traffic camera war on Rochester High Street, and the last call for our Kent Police and Crime Commissioner debate, which is happening tomorrow!
Medway’s Network North bonanza
When the government decided to cancel the HS2 route beyond Birmingham, it pledged that the money saved from the cut would be poured into local transport projects. Given that the project was called Network North, you might expect this money to be spent in the north, but that would be a very silly assumption.
Medway has been awarded £401,000 from the Network North pot this year despite being almost as south as you can possibly be.
So, the UK doesn’t get desperately needed new rail capacity, but we are getting a bunch of smaller, local projects. So what’s on the agenda for Medway?
A whole bunch of road resurfacing, of course.
Despite Medway having one main Victorian rail line through the middle of it (with efforts to build a new passenger route to the peninsula thwarted), and a bus system that is jokingly unreliable, at least we’re going to put some more tarmac down on the roads. Hurrah!
Still, roads do play an important role in places like this, so what exactly will we get? From the document published by Medway Council, the £401,000 will be spent resurfacing a grand total of 11 streets.
Bad luck to anyone in Strood and Rainham.
Still, this speaks to a larger problem with the state of our roads. Reallocating money from a long-term rail project to patch a handful of roads barely scratches the surface of the underlying issue.
Medway Council wrote to the government Minister for Roads and Transport, Guy Opperman, last week to raise the issue of potholes in our towns, raising some rather interesting figures along the way:
Our Officers’ current figures indicate that across our Medway network there are in the region of 2,000 potholes including on key arterial roads and routes.
Professional calculations estimate the sum required to bring all of Medway’s roads up to the standard which is reasonable is around £50 million. The reduction of local government funding has meant that over the last decade the conditions of the road network have reduced. Respectfully an extra £400,000 this year has done very little with such a fundamental challenge in quality and ongoing depreciation.
It would be relatively easy for someone to read the letter as suggesting that Medway has around 2,000 potholes and that repairing them would cost around £50m. £50m is a very large sum, though, and would suggest a cost of around £25,000 per pothole. We’re no experts on potholes, but that seems a little excessive.
We asked Medway Council what the average cost is to repair a pothole, and they returned with a slightly lower figure of £73.13. This figure suggests that a £146,000 pot could repair every pothole in Medway.
So where does the £50m figure come from?
Medway Council told us that the figure goes beyond pothole repair and is instead the figure needed to bring roads in Medway to a ‘specified condition performance’, benchmarked against the national average. They claim this would significantly reduce the amount of road maintenance needed and would reduce further deterioration of our roads. They claim this would ultimately lead to an annual revenue saving from the current position.
Of course, there’s an element of political grandstanding involved here. Medway Council want to make it clear that it doesn’t have the money to fix the roads, but the government isn’t about to give Medway Council £50m to fix every road.
For now, we’ll have to continue relying on Network North funding to ensure the repair of our very southern roads.
Rehman’s office gets egged
Gillingham and Rainham MP Rehman Chishti took to Twitter yesterday to highlight that his constituency office had been attacked by two men, posting a video of two masked men throwing things at the office in the night.
Chishti described this as a ‘real intent by some to undermine our democracy, intimidation violence & trolling’.
A BBC News article on the event claimed Chishti said glass bottles and eggs were thrown at the building. Local Democracy Reporter Robert Boddy headed to the crime scene and found several broken eggshells and some yolk on the building's sign. Kent Police said they were ‘aware of an incident of criminal damage where food items were reported to have been thrown on a wall of business premises in Canterbury Street, Gillingham.’
This is not to say that this shouldn’t be taken seriously. Any kind of political intimidation, egg-based or otherwise, isn’t acceptable, and MPs should be able to work without fear, whether at home or on parliamentary business.
Chishti is facing an increasingly difficult re-election battle as the polls stubbornly refuse to improve for the Conservatives. Electoral Calculus now predicts that he faces a 75% chance of losing his seat in the coming election.
Last call for our election debate
This is your final reminder that the Kent Police and Crime Commissioner election is coming up. Most excitingly, we’re holding a debate between the candidates tomorrow (Wed 17 Apr) in Medway.
Incumbent Matthew Scott (Conservative), Lenny Rolles (Labour), and Graham Colley (Liberal Democrat) will be answering your questions on crime, policing, public safety, and the role of the commissioner.
A fair number of you have booked a place, but we still have room. When booking, you can submit a question for the candidates. We can’t guarantee we’ll be able to ask them all, but we’ll get through as many as we can.
For logistical reasons, we’ve been unable to reveal the venue, but ticketholders will receive full details tomorrow. The venue is in a central Medway location, has ample parking, and is fully accessible.
Don’t be disenfranchised
Today is also the last day you can register to vote in the upcoming election. Voter registration is no longer automatic, so if you’ve recently moved or aren’t registered at your current address, you can get yourself sorted out here.
Finally, you now need a photo ID to vote in elections. Most people will have a driving licence, passport, or one of the other accepted forms. For those who don’t have any, you have roughly a week left to apply for a Voter Authority Certificate. It costs nothing, but you’ll just need a photo of yourself and a few details.
Rochester High St camera war escalates
The increasingly silly argument over the cameras installed on Rochester High Street to catch those breaking traffic rules escalated further last week, with one business taking it into its own hands with potentially dangerous results.
Since February, Medway Council has enforced moving traffic offences with ANPR cameras. While most of these haven’t been hugely controversial, a camera has been installed on Rochester High Street to catch drivers between 10am and 4pm on Saturdays, when the street is temporarily pedestrianised.
Previously, this restriction was enforced by a chain across the road, blocking access for anyone who didn’t get out of their car, remove the chain, and continue on their way. Since the cameras were switched on, Medway Council hasn’t bothered putting the chain across the street.
As a result, some people have been concerned that this is a dangerous move, as cars can freely drive into the High Street (so long as they ignore the no entry signs) and risk running over pedestrians. Former Rochester West Conservative councillor Stuart Tranter has been filing nearly weekly social media updates from the scene, while Rochester Town Centre Forum chairperson Sarah, er, Tranter, has been talking to the press about how shoppers are being ‘put off’ visiting the town over the safety risks.
Medway Council has responded that the restrictions have been in place for decades, and removing the chain makes it easier for residents and emergency vehicles to enter the High Street. They also highlight that there are few safety concerns on other days when the road is open to traffic.
Things have now escalated with the owners of the Fish at 55 dumping beer barrels in the street to protect the ‘hundreds’ of drivers who were driving through the restrictions from being fined, even though this will impede emergency access and those who are allowed to enter the street legally.
Ultimately, this is one of those issues where both sides are effectively right, but no one wants to meet in the middle. It is obvious to almost everyone that the camera replaced the chain as a way of raising revenue. Indeed, the camera would raise nothing if the chain was across, as it serves no other purpose. Motorists should also be able to abide by a clearly signed no entry restriction.
On the other hand, if the Tranters’ reports are correct and hundreds of cars are driving through the restricted area every week, it does raise questions about how effective the signage is and whether the restrictions need to be made clearer. It’s hard to have much sympathy with drivers receiving fines. Still, if large numbers of cars are driving into the High Street during pedestrianised periods, a certain amount of risk is inevitably being introduced, so maybe it is time to look at what else can be done to ensure the street remains as safe as it can be on Saturdays.
In brief
⚽ A man running a football coaching business in a council park has pledged to continue even after Medway Council pointed out that he needed to fill out an application to do so. Medway Soccer Academy generates hundreds of pounds operating in Hillyfields Park in Gillingham but considers the council’s £61 hire fee a ‘cash grab’.
🍱 Wagamama will open in Chatham on May 13. The new location at Chatham Dockside will be the first Wagamama in Medway, and a new Zizzi restaurant alongside will open towards the end of May.
🎾 Frindsbury Lawn Tennis Club in Upnor plans to rip up their tennis lawns in a bid to survive. Membership has waned since Avenue Tennis opened in Gillingham, and the owners are now attempting to pivot to padel tennis instead to keep things afloat.
💉 Bookings are now open for the Spring covid vaccine booster if you’re in an eligible group. This time around, vaccines are only available for people over 75, with weakened immune systems, in care homes, or anyone willing to pay £99 for one from Boots.
More Authority
Our paid supporters receive extra editions of Local Authority every week. Over the weekend, we published interviews with the two challengers to the role of Kent Police and Crime Commissioner: Labour’s Lenny Rolles and the Liberal Democrats’ Graham Colley.
"It feels at the moment in politics like all hope is gone"
"If you don’t have access to justice, then those rights are just ideas"
You can also read our interview from last year with the current Kent Police and Crime Commissioner, Matthew Scott of the Conservatives, as he campaigns for a third term in the role:
Footnotes
Music that soundtracked the creation of this edition: Teenage Retirement by Chumped, The Death of Nightlife by Help She Can’t Swim, and House Without A View by Lande Hekt.
To be fair, it looks like more than half the £401,000 has already been spent/allocated in the current year to a Medway-wide 'carriageway patching' project, which sounds a bit like potholes to me. (Previous table in the document)
Rather worrying to me is that Medway Council doesn't appear to know where some of its roads are: Grain Road, Peninsula Way, and Chapel Road are not in Rochester, they're in places like Hoo, Stoke, and Grain.
Well done on dissecting the £50 million figure though - very misleading letter!