First meeting of the Sustainable Environment Committee

It is a new municipal year and a new select committee. We have a new name and a new chair - Councillor Steve Radford.

I presented our final Parks Strategy Scrutiny Panel report and it seemed to go down very well. No-one argued with any of the proposals which is good news indeed. I remain cautiously optimistic that our many recommendations will come to pass.

I was of course disappointed that the new Parks Scrutiny Panel has a new Chair - a new LibDem councillor named Paul Twigger. He was appointed without discussion or voting by Cllr Radford who also appointed LibDem councillor Roger Johnson as Chair of the Waste Scrutiny Panel and Paul Twigger again as the vice-chair of the committee itself.

So four jobs available for appointment and three LibDems and a Liberal put into post (and all men, but we are supposed not to notice that, I wager!). You can make your own assumptions from that.