Reply to comment, Community Hall

Reply to comment

Witten for the Blog by a Preston resident

I would agree with you that a village hall is normally under the remit of the Parish Council. However, Preston Parish Council established a Charity (Preston Community Hall Charity) with the aim of providing a Community Hall for Preston, which in itself is a good cause that warrants support from residents.

To get support from residents they need to be part of the process and involved with the activity that was aimed at providing a Community Hall. In my opinion, by being part of things gives residents a sense of involvement and ‘ownership’ of any such project and therefore boosts it’s progress.

We have had a running battle with Preston Parish Council for almost three years now on the provision of a Community Hall. This is because, having established the Charity the council then went underground and pursued the project in an underhand way with no involvement from the community and all things to do with the hall appeared to be very secretive. The community wasn’t even allowed a say in any sort of consultation and consequently very few residents knew of the project.

The council spent about £7500 of residents money getting plans drawn up and applying for the demolition of the existing hall in order that a very expensive New Community Hall could be built. The council continued to resist enquiries seeking information relating to the Community Hall insisting that they couldn’t even mention the words Community Hall during council meetings or any other time because there are laws that prevent them from doing so, that sounds completely illogical to me.

We have never been able to locate the existence of any such laws and despite requests that the council identify those restrictions, they have never responded, that can only be because no such legal restrictions exist and what the Parish Council were telling us was entirely untrue and that can only have been deliberate on the councils part.

In fact, the Charities Commission support Council Charities giving updates to residents and public during council meetings as that helps ‘connect’ to the community. Both the councils stance and the Charities Commission stance cannot both be right, one of them must be dishonest, which one?

We were promised and assured that at the Preston Community Hall Charity AGM 2010 all questions would be answered fully and to the satisfaction of residents. Needless to say that AGM meeting was very well attended and we eagerly attended to receive that information.

The meeting was opened by the Parish Council Chairman and we were informed that the only business on the agenda was the accounts and that no other subject was listed for discussion, once again the council reneged on those promises and assurances at the last minute, not at all unusual for Preston Parish Council. The room was full of residents waiting to hear about progress and activity on the Community Hall, you can imagine the commotion that created, the AGM lasted 1 hour and 2 minutes.

If I can just return to the application for planning permission for a moment, I believe the approval for the building of a new hall was renewed in January 2011 but the permission for demolition of the old village hall was not, therefore any new structure could not be built because there was no permission to clear the site for that purpose and the plans were abandoned resulting in a wastage of £7,500 of residents money. We were informed by the East Riding Council Planning Department that they had withdrawn the application because the Parish Council had not responded to their enquiries, the Parish Council deny this. Again both accounts cannot be correct so one must be intentionally misleading.

I asked the council in writing in 2010 if there had been any kind of survey carried out on the existing Village Hall that professionally established it’s current condition and possible suitability for refurbishment. I received the reply (in writing) that as far as the council were aware there had never been any such survey, I knew this to be untrue because I was in possession of a survey copy that had been carried out on the Village Hall just a few years before and it gave the hall a clean bill of health, structurally!

After pressing the council they finally agreed that there had indeed been a survey but denied it had been carried out for the Parish Council and made the point that the Parish Council had not commissioned or funded the survey. Prior to this the council had always denied the existence of any survey, why?

There are current councillors who attended council meetings regularly to ask questions on this subject in 2010 but since joining the council have gone very quiet and would seem to no longer have any desire for transparency.

If there are legal restrictions on the council it’s very simple and easy to state those restrictions and that would end the matter, without that it can only be that the council is being deliberately untruthful or deliberately obstructive.

So we return to a village hall being the remit of the Parish Council, in any normal council I would agree with that assumption but with Preston Parish Council things are never that simple or clear cut.

Much of this has now been superseded by the new council (sorry, Charity) allowing residents to refurbish the existing hall.

I do hope this helps but some of these items are to be dealt with in greater detail in a later posting.

Thanks for reading and commenting.