We save our phone box!

Well done to my fellow parish councillors Judy Stevens and Chris Pearce - and children from our local school - to save our traditional phone kiosk and give it a new lease of life...

See report and photos in tonight's Peterborough Evening Telegraph.

A Deeping good time was had by all...

Cracking day at the annual Deeping St James Rose and Sweet Pea Show in the Vicarage grounds today, with the weather just about holding off - as it does for us most years.

As I recall, there's only been one year in the past 25 or so that the event organised by Priory Church has been rained off.

It's a real highlight in the calendar of our community, with almost a feeling of entering a time-warp at the Vicarage gates.

DSJ Parish Council was there today in numbers including councillors Ashley Baxter, Kim Parr, Judy Stevens, Stuart Wallis, and Gerd Windsor manning the Council's stand and display illustrating our work for the local community.

We invited parishioners to write comments on what's good and what's not so good about our village on 'post-it' notes.

Good response, from 'thanks for keeping the riverbank nicely mown' to 'why no litter bins on Broadgate Lane?'.

All will be considered and appropriate action taken.

As chairman, yours truly had the honour of announcing the winners of the trophies given by the parish council for the first time, which were then presented by the newly crowned Rose Queen.

Cath Henderson won the prize for plant in an unusual container and parish councillor John Broughton took the best exhibit produced on the council's allotments.

John clearly has green fingers, coming up with a fine display of fragrant sweet peas (in contrast to my own efforts which seem unlikely to produce flowers, fragrant or not, for another few weeks).

John also grows raspberries on his allotment - which he generously shared with councillors at our meeting on Thursday. They were totally delicious and vindication for those of us who worked to open new allotments just a few years ago.

In defence of police community support officers...

The Daily Mail seldom lets the facts get in the way of a good headline: as illustrated by their ridiculous attack a couple of days ago on Lincolnshire's police community support police officers.

The Mail discovered that PCSOs in our county have cost taxpayers almost £10 million, but only issued 15 fixed penalty notices.

To get its headline, the Mail joins up these two pieces of information to assert:

"It means each fixed penalty notice costs more than £650,000 in public money..."

That's complete Mail rubbish and sloppy journalism: the Mail wrongly assumes that the sole purpose of PCSOs is to issue tickets and dismisses out of hand all the other valuable work they do.

Issuing tickets was never meant to be a top priority for PCSOs. The clue the Mail conveniently misses is in the title of course...

The prime role of PCSOs is supporting full police officers and increasing the uniformed on our streets.

And in my humble opinion, they do an excellent value-for-money job for local communities.

Here in the Deepings, our PCSOs patrol our streets and give reassurance to local communities.

Before they existed, residents (and particularly former Tory councillor Victor Bulmer-Jones) endlessly whinged that we never saw a police officer locally. Now, thanks to the team of more than 150 PCSOs, we do - and satisfaction with Lincolnshire Police has risen since they were recruited.

PCSOs providng 'visibility' and 'reassurance' to local neighbourhoods actually frees up full police officers to concentrate on aspects of policing that demand a more than a month's basic training .

I was very disappointed to see one of my colleagues on the Police Authority quoted in the Mail's story thus:

One member of the Lincolnshire police authority admitted taxpayers would be alarmed by the details of the PCSOs' performance.

Councillor Chris Underwood-Frost said the £10 million spent on the team could have paid for 70 full-time officers.

He added: 'People aren't daft - the public know that this is just policing on the cheap. It's like sending the army to Afghanistan without any guns.'

Chris is one of the Tory councillors on the Police Authority who forced through the totally daft and eye-watering council tax rise of 78.9 per cent for policing last year.

Fortunately, the Labour Government sensibly 'capped' the Authority - ordered a refund of £50 for every council taxpayer in the county.

The comments attributed to Councillor Chris U-F suggest that Lincolnshire's 159 PCSOs each cost less than half that of a fully trained police officer.

The Tories hate PCSOs - largely because they were brought in by Labour and not them!

But if the Tories - or anyone else - seriously believe that PCSOs are a waste of money and should be scrapped, I'd invite them to go on patrol for a shift with our own PCSO Chris Clarke.

Last year, some toerag dumped a load of stinking rubbish in the cemetery behind my house. I called PCSO Chris and despitye it being a Sunday morning he was there in minutes. Even better, the toerag was caught and was duly prosecuted and fined. That's value.

Any local resident is welcome to pop along to the next Deeping St James Parish Council meeting at the Institute on the last Thursday of the month at 7.30pm when PCSO Chris gives his monthly report on his excellent work in our community.

Just a couple of weeks ago, for example, PCSO Chris reported on how he effectively dealt with an outbreak of anti-social behaviour in one part of our village.

My picture shows PCSO Chris a couple of years ago dealing with the fire which destroyed a row of shops on the old Todds Garage site.

Using Daily Mail logic, if this fire was the only one dealt with by PCSOs, Chris's presence for this picture cost the taxpayer £10 million...

What about your own village Ray...?

Bemused to see more controversy over a recycling centre for Stamford reported in the Mercury.

We also need recycling facilities to serve the Deepings and we have an ideal privately-run site here on Station Road - away from residential areas yet convenient for the 12,000 residents.

But trying to get local authority support for our own home-grown site over the past couple of years has been like knocking my head against a brick wall - despite the fact that it wouldn't cost hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money which councillors seem to want to throw at Stamford's problem.

I notice that district councillor Ray Auger was chairing a meeting about the controversial plans for a Stamford site...

Ray lives here in Deeping St James.

As a resident, Ray benefits from the weekly skip which is now paid for by Deeping St James Parish Council after total frustration at lack of support from South Kesteven District Council and Lincolnshire County Council.

I look forward to the day when Ray puts as much effort into getting recycling problems sorted in his own village as he does for Stamford...

New skip service starts for DSJ...

A new service started this weekend to provide residents of Deeping St James a way of getting rid of non-recylclable waste.

As county councillor for the village, I've been trying for almost two years to get an alternative to the much-missed 'bring to vehicle' service which was withdrawn by Lincolnshire County Council in December 2005.

Unfortunately, it's been like banging my head against a brick wall.

Incredibly, the multi-million business that is our county council took well over 18 months to decide whether they could provide a weekly skip at the privately-owned Deepings Recycling Centre.

I managed to get the Councillor Lewis Strange the Executive Member for Waste Services and senior officer to visit DSJ on several occasions, and each time there was much promise but no delivery of an alternative to the service they pulled.

I'm pleased to say that Deeping St James Parish Council took a more enlightened attitude than our county council.

When it became obvious that the county council were not prepared to help, the parish council agreed to fund a skip each Saturday from now until the end of March 2008 as a trial service.

I was unable to get down to Deepings Recycling Centre on Station Road yesterday to see how things went yesterday.

But I understand that parish council chairman Councillor Jim Blessett was one of the first to use the new service.

Ian Prentice who runs Deepings Recycling Centre tells me that the service proved popular on its launch day and that many items were recycled rather than ending up in the landfill skip.

Good news.