Jumpers and St Catherine's Hill Community Information

For many years Christchurch Borough has been well served by a small group of active Residents' Associations. From Highcliffe to West Christchurch we work to maintainChristchurch as a place where time is pleasant, either working individually or in unison.

In recent times our most successful joint campaign ended in Dorset County Council scrapping plans to build a hugely expensive waste processing plant at Hurn. Each year we met with the Chief Executive of Christchurch Council and his key colleagues to the mutual benefit of all parties. It was for example these meetings that led directly to Christchurch Council taking a far more active interest in the rate of erosion of Hengistbury Head.

The decision by East Dorset and Christchurch Councils to merge large parts of their administrations presented us with an issue. Senior Council Officers that had previously only had Christchurch to worry about would now be thinking in addition about Corfe Mullen, Ferndown and Wimborne. The immediate impact of that change might be to reduce the clout of the Christchurch organisations.

To investigate the viability of other options we entered into talks with various bodies to explore the possibility of forming a new umbrella organisation that would represent East Dorset residents as well as those from Christchurch. We were surprised to discover that East Dorset had very few Residents Associations and believe that this is because there are so many local Councils such as Ferndown that people don't see the need for such representation. Of course the Localism Bill, if it becomes an Act, may in time change that perception.

Many of the groups tend to be single issue ginger groups. We met several of them and attempted for a trial period of some six months to work with them. However it became apparent that the different approach to dealing with Councillors and Council Officers adopted by some of them did not fit with our attempts to build mutually beneficial relationships.

Reluctantly we decided to drop the idea of including East Dorset and to restrict our activities to Christchurch whilst establishing improved links with Hurn and Burton Parish Councils. From our limited experience of dealing with the new merged administration we do not now believe that this will disadvantage the residents of Christchurch. We will keep this decision under review and if a Localism Act changes the situation we may resurrect the idea of bringing Christchurch and East Dorset groups together.

Jim Biggin

Secretary

April 2011