The Home Office has announced a new fund to stimulate innovative approaches to tackling community safety problems. They are looking for local groups to come up with creative new solutions to the crime issues that matter to them. The fund will be available to local people and voluntary sector organisations, and are particularly keen for the fund to reach grass roots community activists.
NatWest CommunityForce is offering three community projects in the area the chance to win awards of £6,000 each. Local residents will then have the chance to vote for the projects that will benefit the area most.
The parks and green spaces of Bedford Borough have again been recognised as ranking among the best in the country by Keep Britain Tidy.
MEDIA LIE: The Lib Dems have rowed back on all their General Election Manifesto promises.
Royal Borough plans to allow people to jump the allotment queue in the Royal Borough by placing some allotments out to auction on e-bay to the highest bidder are not fair say local Lib Dems.
Cllr Chris Caswill (Chippenham Monkton ward) has called for an overhaul of the standards of residential care for Wiltshire residents. At the July 12th Wiltshire Council meeting, Chris was given an assurance by the Cabinet member for adult social care, John Thomson, that all was well at Rose Villa, the Castlebeck residential home in Bristol. Several Wiltshire residents live there. Castlebeck are the company which ran the notorious Winterbourne View home which was the subject of a Panorama documentary. Within hours of Cllr Thomson's assurance it was revealed by the BBC that staff at Rose Villa had been suspended and within a couple of weeks the Care Quality Commission identified Rose Villa as one of the four Castlebeck residential homes about which they had 'serious concerns'. Rose Villa was judged inadequate on five 'essential standards'. Cllr Caswill has now written to Cllr Thomson to ask how he, and NHS Wiltshire, could give assurances about the care being given to Wiltshire residents in the morning, which w