21st April 2009; Public Meeting at the Carnegie Rooms with Breckland Council

On Tuesday evening, I attended the 'Thetford Neighbourhood Forum' which is basically an opportunity for Thetford to keep the pressure on Breckland Council to actually deliver a reasonable level of service in this town - this was the third meeting, with the first being initiated by the Thetford Society and then the event became consumed and stage-managed directly by the Council. I found the 'you said, we did' presentation particularly interesting for a variety of reasons. Anyway, I too the opportunity to ask two questions, 1) Would Breckland Council commit to keeping the Redcastle Community Centre open for community use when the lease expires at the end of July as at present - the centre will be closed from August and will be a great loss to this community and 2) Would the Council support groups such as the Thetford Ballpark whom, like so many other organisations and facilities in this town and so greatly under-supported and constantly at risk. These were the only questions asked, out of approximately 30 questions, to prompt the Leader of Breckland Council - William Nunn, to jump up and answer, rather than the Chief Executive Trevor Holden (more about the questionner rather than the questions??) A fairly wishy washy answer to both parts resulted, but nethertheless, I did raise the point and hopefully some good may come of it. The main bone of contention on the evening, as expected, was the Abbey Barns. A day earlier Breckland Council's Development Control Committee had controversially agreed to grant planning permission to turn this historically significant site into housing. The state of St Mary the Less Church on Bury Road was also discussed. We have serious issues in Thetford with buildings, some historically significant (E.g. Abbey Barns and St Mary the Less), others just visually significant (E.g. Pine Close shops) just being left to rot, and sit as a severe risk to the health and safety of the community. Breckland Council has a statutory obligation to ensure the protection of these buildings and safeguard them. They fail miserably in this respect. Breckland Council claimed at the meeting to be doing all they can to force landlords to protect buildings, this is simply not the case. I reminded the Chief Executive that if a local authority was to serve an 'Enforcement Notice' on a landlord, demanding work is carried out, if such a notice was ignored, other authorities would undertake this work, and then promptly issue the landlord with the bill for it, with failure to repay resulting in court action. This is a power available to Breckland which it does not utilise. Breckland has no budget for 'works in default' and as I stated on Tuesday; "it will not be enforcement ACTION if there are no teeth, behind the words".