Military families
There are encouraging hints in the papers today that the Government will offer military families a reprieve from the planned taxation on education. This tax is wrong in itself, wrong in principle; but it is particularly bad in its effect on our armed forces personnel, who have to move home frequently and for whom boarding school is the only way to give their children any continuity in their education.
I recently met with 50 local parents all considering leaving the forces if they have to find thousands of pounds a year to cover the tax rises. So this is good news, if true - but as I said yesterday, the relief must cover ALL military families with children in independent schools, not just those who currently get support from the government.
Pubs
The other items in this week’s budget I’ll be keeping an ear open for - aside from the big ones, the threatened hike in NICs and other taxes on employment and savings - are measures to help or hurt the key institutions of our villages: pubs and churches. As I said here this week, pubs are closing at an alarming rate across the country, and many only hold on because of the support given by the last government, including frozen alcohol duty and the price guarantee to help them compete with the supermarkets; if Rachel Reeves sees pubs as cash cows for her spending commitments, we will lose many more.
Churches
As for churches, I’ve been campaigning to pressure the Chancellor not to slap VAT on repairs to listed buildings, which have been exempted from the tax by the last government. I spoke (see here) to the churchwarden and a PCC member at St Mary’s, Great Bedwyn, this week about how the exemption enabled them to save the church roof. It is vital Ms Reeves doesn’t - as it were - strip the lead from our churches this week.
Trains
I met the leaders of the Bedwyn Rail Passengers Group to discuss the latest convolutions in the long campaign to restore the GWR timetable to its - momentary - glory in 2019, when the town had a proper direct service to London. The opportunity is approaching to bring back the train sets we lost to Wales, and also get a decent evening service so people don’t have to wait forlornly at Newbury for a train that often never comes. I will persevere in my efforts with the new government, in honour of the memory - recorded by John Chandler - of ‘one of the pupils who heard the trains rattle his classroom windows in Great Bedwyn school, [and] rose to become Sir Felix Pole, general manager of Great Western Railway.’
Great Bedwyn
Great Bedwyn is a jewel of a village, a lively and thriving place whose church and pub are complemented by a Post Office, a GP surgery, a corner shop, a school, a garage, a tennis club, and of course a station connecting Marlborough to London. As in any community there are differences of opinion. I wandered, oblivious, into the battle of the bowling green, between the tennis courts and Wendy’s Cafe; the village is in two minds whether to re-open the green for bowls, or let the tennis court and cafe expand from either side.
A more difficult choice hovers over housing. William Cobbett, riding through here in 1821, found it a poor place: ‘the whole of the houses are not intrinsically worth a thousand pounds’; he wouldn’t say that now. Houses are shockingly expensive and the adult children of most local people simply cannot afford to live here.
Some say the field beside the school would make an ideal site for more affordable housing, albeit the field lies not in Great Bedwyn but in Little Bedwyn parish, the boundaries of which date to the year 778. Others think the village is big enough, and we should stop the Housing Associations selling off their affordable homes in Bedwyn at market rates to buy properties in cheaper places like Trowbridge.
This is the real stuff of politics. How do we manage scarce resources, of which land is the most precious of all, for the benefit of today’s and tomorrow’s residents, with equity and sensitivity? My only answer is to ensure the whole community gets a say, in a process that respects all interests and shades of opinion. Places like Great Bedwyn are rich not just in institutions but in skills and community spirit.
At my drop-in meeting at the village hall on Saturday we discussed the brilliant work volunteers do in clearing the footpaths hearabout, and how the Parish Council pulled together a diverse cast of partners to defend the village against flooding this autumn. But much more needs doing. The Parish Council needs councillors (please apply!), and people need connection - as Dr Julia Hempenstall at the GP Surgery told me, the great health risk for local people is loneliness.
Perhaps the disputatious spirit of Great Bedwyn stems from the battle here between the men of Wessex and of Mercia in 675. It was a significant place from Saxon times, and after the Norman Conquest became a stopping place on the royal progress (‘This town provides one night’s entertainment for the King’s household with all usual customs’, says the Domesday Book). The church, whose cruciform shape tells of its importance, holds the bones of Sir John Seymour of Wolf Hall (whose ruins lie up the lane towards Savernake Forest), where Henry VIII stayed on a hunting trip and snared John’s daughter Jane for his third Queen.
