Last November a chap (Let’s call him Dave) spoke to me in the pub. He and his friends had had a brilliant idea. It still takes a bit of getting used to that others have brilliant ideas even when Ribchester residents have brilliant ideas quite frequently.
This brilliant idea was to make the piece of land on Greenside a registered Village Green. It sounds a pretty straightforward plan and all we needed to do was ask the landowner to apply to Lancashire County Council. Minor issue though. The decision makers are LCC (Which should be abolished!) and the landowners are Ribble Valley Borough Council. Oh dear…
Ever the optimist, I asked the Director of Community Services at RVBC to put it on the agenda for Community Services Committee. I asked him several times over the first part of this year. I then wrote a motion for Community Services Committee. That got bumped to Policy and Finance Committee on 15th September. Frustratingly, it then got deferred, by a Tory amendment, to the next Policy and Finance Committee in November.
It’s at this point one might begin to think that, with the endless back and forth on such a simple request, there has been more ping pong on this than a Benidorm Cabaret Act.
Here’s the Motion we submitted
What We Need From You
It has become clear that we cannot rely on just the voluntary application route to get this through. We asked for this as the most simple route but also have been patient not to pursue the evidence based route so far due to it being the more resource intensive route. Whilst not abandoning the voluntary application route, we’re now beginning to collect evidence for an alternative route to registration.
Right now, we need to start collecting evidence of this piece of land being used for leisure and recreation over the past 20+ years.
If you have any photos, leaflets or flyers of events on Greenside which can be dated and used as evidence we’d love you to get in touch. Simply upload a copy right here with dates and any background information. This will go into our evidence file to submit.
