Page 37 - Phonebox Magazine May 2013

CC
COUNCILLOR CORNER
A contribution from Cllr Debbie Brock & Cllr Peter Geary
THE SALT BOX, LAVENDON
THE KITCHENER CENTRE
ANNUAL PARISH MEETINGS
We reported last month that a developer was going to hold a public consultation meeting over a likely planning application for the Salt Box site in Lavendon. This site has had some history with planning before with a proposal 6 years ago that never made it to an actual planning application. The proposal this time is for an outline planning application for 9 houses. Five of these will be small properties of around 700 square feet which will be located near to the road, four much larger properties are proposed to be spread across the rest of the site. These would be round 3000 square feet in area. The properties are designed to be low impact and to be passive in utilising as much natural heating and lighting as possible. This is a very different proposal to last time both in design and density.
When we attended the meeting and spoke to a few people, some seemed quite impressed by the proposals and others less so. The developer seems confident of bringing a planning application forward in the next few months and therefore we will keep people updated on progress and will arrange a public meeting with planning officers where residents can make their views known.
The Kitchener Centre is located in Olney and provides day care facilities for older people from Olney and the surrounding area. This is a Council funded service and is for people who are able to live in their own homes but accessing the service helps reduce the sense of social isolation and contributes to their sense of wellbeing in many ways. The building is owned by Milton Keynes Council and the service currently operated by Age UK Milton Keynes and has been since it first opened.
The Kitchener Centre is not the only building based day care facility in Milton Keynes there is another larger facility at Manor Road in Bletchley. This is currently run by The Red Cross; however they have made a decision nationally to stop providing day care facilities and gave Milton Keynes Council notice of this last year. As result Milton Keynes Council invited tenders last summer to run either or both facilities with a specification that also included day opportunities in other community settings as had been successfully piloted by the Red Cross alongside the traditional building based offer.
This is not a statutory service and where some councils across the country have been closing their day care facilities, Milton Keynes Council has decided to keep both facilities open and has not cut the budget, however a combined bid should have been able to realise some management cost savings.
Milton Keynes Council has consistently budgeted and paid for the transport, utilities and building maintenance as well as the budget to provide the service itself. The Council’s Finance Team are required to ensure that the budget available is sufficient before any approval to tender is sought from the Cabinet Procurement Committee. This was done prior to the paper in July last year.
The tender process ran into the early part of this year with the decision about whether to let the tender or not and to whom, being taken at a Cabinet Procurement Committee at the beginning of April. When any tender is let the scoring system is done based on a mix of quality and price and when bidders are sought the ratio is set. In this case the balance was set at 60% of the score for quality and 40% for price. This
demonstrates that a high quality bid was being sought and it would not just be let to the organisation that was the cheapest. At the end of the process it was recommended by officers that the tender was not let as the only bidder, Age UK Milton Keynes, had bid significantly higher than the budget allocated. In addition there were issues with the quality of the submission – this is in no way to be confused with the quality of care at The Kitchener Centre which is highly rated, but to do with how the specification for the more personalised day opportunity service would be fully organised & realised .
As there will be no provider at Manor Road in Bletchley from the end of June, a decision had to be made about how to proceed in order to secure this service, so that older people at the highest end of needs will not be impacted. Milton Keynes Council has expertise in running day care facilities and decided after much thought and planning that both facilities could be run by Milton Keynes Council in the future. Any members of staff at either facility, who wish to, can transfer to Milton Keynes Council’s employment.
This was a difficult decision to make and was only done after a lot of thought, consideration and work to see what options were available. You may have seen that Olney Town Council had had representations from Age UK Milton Keynes at their March meeting with the item also being discussed at the April meeting. As a result of the discussion at it’s April Meeting, Olney Town Council decided to “call in” the decision. Call in’s are a method by which any member of Milton Keynes Council, any Parish Council or 20 members of the public can ask for a committee of the council to consider a decision that has been taken, again. They cannot change the decision but they can if they wish, ask for the Procurement Committee or Cabinet to consider the item again, if they find evidence that could change their minds. This is a process that is rarely used by parish councils but in this case has put a halt on the preparation for Milton Keynes Council to step in to take over the service. The call in is going to be considered at a meeting of the Executive Scrutiny Committee in Milton Keynes on the 23rd April, after the Phonebox has gone to press, we will however let people know the result in our next column. In the mean time we understand that some service users of the Kitchener Centre and their families are concerned about future. Please do not be, the service at the Kitchener centre will continue, it will just take a few more weeks to sort out how things will work but the same staff will continue to work in the same way and the service will be maintained, something which has all along been paramount to us.
It is the time of year when Annual Parish Meetings take place. In some parishes these happened in April however Olney is due to hold theirs on May 2nd at 7:00pm in the Olney Centre and Ravenstone will hold theirs on Thursday, 9th May 2013 at
Ravenstone Village Hall at 7:30pm. While all meetings of the parish council are open to the public the annual meetings give people a chance to hear reports on the round up of the year from both the parish council and other organisations and in many cases give members of the public the chance to question their councils on what has happened in the past year.
We will be running our Surgeries as usual on the first Friday of the month and in May this is May 3rd from 7:30pm - 8:30pm. If you have any issue you wish to raise then please come along, or contact us before hand and we will try to help.
Phonebox Magazine 37