31 January 2020
2019 was a massive year for Greens in Tonbridge and Malling. The local council election returned two Green councillors in Judd ward with thumping majorities and one of the biggest voter turnouts in the country. This achieved our ambition for Green voices to be heard in the Council Chamber for the first time.
The general election of 12 th December - sadly interpreted by many as a second referendum - saw a 70% increase in our vote share. The national result highlighted the iniquity of the first-past-the-post system when 860,000 Green votes delivered just one MP, no MP resulted from 644,000 Brexit Party votes, yet 244,127 votes secured eight DUP MPs. This shows that we need proportional representation more than ever.
Ensuring the Air Quality Management Area is protected is key to us. We believe that solutions that reduce pollution and encourage low carbon transport should be at the heart of infrastructure planning. We have fought to have high-specification air monitoring equipment returned to Tonbridge High Street and want to find the best combination of traffic measures to make our town centre as safe as possible. We are finalising proposals for the Borough Council’s Climate Change Policy to ensure it is a meaningful undertaking.
In 2020, we shall ask the Council to consider the redevelopment of the Angel Centre, and how best to use town centre property assets in partnership with other bodies including KCC. We want to see a departure from a 20th Century business model of selling lucrative plots to developers who then cream off the lion’s share of the profit.
The Council has identified the need for temporary accommodation in the borough but refuses to build such housing in favour of seeking property on the open market. Other councils invest in housing for their communities and ours should too.
We want to ensure that the council gets the best possible value from its property so we are suggesting several schemes where a number of functions are served on the same site. We want to see the right homes built in the right places. Rather than destroying the Green Belt, this could be achieved by building on brown field land, for example at the huge Vale Road and Aylesford Newsprint sites. We will be making this point during the Local Plan Inspection.
The chaotic implementation of the new waste collection ‘service’ shows the price to be paid from outsourcing to the cheapest contract available. We will continue to strive for value for money for the residents of our borough.
We are appalled that Tom Tugendhat recently voted to block access for child refugees trying to be reunited with their families here and we will continue to hold him to account on this and other issues.
We look forward to a fantastic summer of amazing events laid on by our community. People are the town’s biggest asset and we want to support them by introducing a brochure (including for instance a food and ale trail) to showcase the spectacular turnaround in our town’s fortunes against national trends.
We believe in our town and we believe its future is Green.
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