Services are best delivered and organised locally. Southwell and Caunton residents deserve good services based here. The Liberal Democrats will campaign to get a good deal from the County and District Councils and to develop ‘local’ services here.

We believe that decisions should be taken as locally as possible. Because of this we will devolve as many decisions as we can to your community..

Now we publish our priorities for Nottinghamshire

Our top priorities …

We will maintain the freeze on the Council Tax for at least the first year of any administration in Nottinghamshire in which the Liberal Democrats play a part.

Continuing the crack down on crime is a key priority for the Liberal Democrats. We will work with the Police to take further action to make our villages feel safer. We will campaign to make sure that Southwell Police Station, covering the village, has a fully staffed Neighbourhood Beat team, with a PC and two PCSOs. We will campaign to keep our Police Station and Fire Station open in Southwell. We will fight to keep our community protected and feeling safe.

We will reduce the spending on Council PR and internal management and invest any savings in services for young people (e.g. Youth Centres and Performing Arts).

We will not sell any more Council Care homes. The cost of the home help service has gone up massively under the Tories. We will support the elderly to allow them to stay in their own homes if they want to.

We will work with the bus companies and residents to have a better rural bus service as the Tory led changes for the village have not worked well. We will make sure that our buses and trains work together to give a better public transport service.

Many of villages’ roads and pavements are in a terrible state of disrepair. We will invest an extra £1 million into bringing them up to standard and filling pot holes properly. After years of failed promises by the Tories to do so, we will bar heavy lorries from rural roads, like Grassthorpe Road, Sutton-on-Trent unless they are delivering to farms locally.

We will campaign to make sure that the County Council repairs local roads such as the Lower Kirklington Road, Southwell, Newark Road, Caunton and the other roads and pavements in our area that are in such a poor state. We will campaign for more pedestrian crossings in Southwell and to make our roads safer.

We will take further action to cut the flooding problems faced by many residents across our villages.

We will invest in our area by dealing with fly tipping, rubbish in our hedge rows and improving
the grass cutting. We will consider the environment in everything we do.

We will explore trying to re-open post office facilities in villages where they have closed and there is demand. Our success at reopening Sutton-on-Trent Post Office shows that we can do this.

There are some specific issues for our area too:

We will continue to support a variety of Southwell events for the benefit of residents – bringing in new visitors and trade into the town to support its economy. We will support village events using the resources made available from the County Council fund.

We oppose the Southwell by-pass; it will just become the new edge of Southwell, without reducing our traffic. It will increase traffic through Upton. We will work to downgrade the A612 to a B or C road instead, and ban HGVs using Southwell and the villages as through routes.

The Liberal Democrats will fight huge housing development on the edge of Southwell. We will campaign to stop the expansion of a small market town into our surrounding fields and inappropriate sites in the town. We will do everything possible protect our historic heritage. We will support the development of small local developments, especially for affordable housing in the villages.

We will continue to support leisure facilities and the Library in Southwell and Sutton-on-Trent; we will work hard to continue to have good facilities available to residents across this rural area, for young and old.

We will continue ‘free parking’ in the Southwell – paid for by the Town Council – so that visitors and local people from the villages can get to our shops and businesses in the town centre.

We will work hard to keep our area attractive, clean and well cared for. We will continue to ask you to support the Town and Parish Council’s emptying of the litter and dog bins, putting up the hanging baskets and Christmas lights in Southwell and keeping our town and villages well maintained. We will campaign to reduce the amount of rubbish that is accumulating in our roadside verges.