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Interview with District Councillor Keith Gordon  (5th October 2011)

Rochford Life: Keith, to recap, you’re the District Council portfolio holder for Leisure, Tourism, Heritage, the Arts, Culture and Business. I find it’s in the Executive Decisions where I find most of the significant issues you have to decide upon. What ones have particularly involved you, since last Christmas, shall we say?
Keith: Yes, and in the Minutes. It’s been fairly easy since last Christmas. One of the ones people may not know about is having to make an Executive Decision about Sex Shops. This was because the government changed the rules, and we didn’t have a policy for this so I had to sign off a policy for it.
Another thing I’ve done since Christmas is close Wakering Sports Centre. That closed officially Friday last week, which wasn’t a happy thing to do but it saved us about £81,000 a year. Unfortunately not a lot of people used it. It was used mainly by people out of the District for parties. We’re still negotiating with some other people who might take it over, as either a soft play area or something like that. We’re also in discussions with the primary school there and Essex County Council to maybe give them a bit of a boost to get their swimming pool covered over, and that will become their main hall and become a sports facility for Wakering.
I’ve also been carrying on getting ‘Shop at my Local’ going. We lost our Economic Development Officer because of ill-health and she had been off for quite some time so it was quite a struggle to keep it going, and the Business Support Officer had to leave to have a baby, so to try to keep the Business Breakfasts and the Chamber of Commerce stuff going has meant real effort. Fortunately we now have a new Economic Development Officer and a full-time assistant , so she’s picking up ‘Shop at my Local’ and other items as well so we’re getting back into the swing of things.    

RL: Do you think ‘Shop at my Local’ really works?
Keith: Yes, because it reminds people that we’re here. It also gives them the benefit of shopping locally in as much as they use the vouchers, which the shop-keepers provide. It may not be much but every 10-15%  helps and reminds people that they are there. It can’t be doing too badly because we won the third prize in the regional and national contests for the Enterprising Britain (to see article on winning Eastern Region CLICK HERE )   We’re also trying to franchise it and at the day at the House of Lords we had seven other councils come up to us to talk to us about franchise. They see that it’s a scheme that will work for their own areas and so why should they go through the same pain in setting it up as we did?   

RL: Can I just check? Vouchers?
Keith: If you sign up on line, and it costs nothing to sign up, there will be vouchers on the web-site which are put in by the retailers to encourage people to go. (At the time of writing special voucher offers in Ashingdon and Rochford include 10% off bouquets at The Flower Basket, 10% off dry cleaning at Alan’s, 10% off at Ernest Doe’s, 5% off at Head Master, and free half hour consultation on new family matters at Giles Wilson solicitors - http://www.shopatmylocal.com).  The whole idea is to keep people local. We can’t defeat Tesco’s or Sainsbury’s, the big shops, but if we can keep people coming in for the top-ups and speciality things, then we are doing well. I carry on meetings with the Chamber of Commerce and I’m trying to have meetings with the land owners to boost the rural economy; farming is almost 20% of the employment around this area. We’re trying to get a bit closer to them to see if there are things we can do to help them. It may be it would have links with tourism. All these things help the District.

RL: OK, other things?  
Keith: Well, we’ve been fighting the Highways Dept of County for the upgrades to the Sutton Ford bridge, near to the entrance to Purdey’s Industrial Estate which was meant to have started this year in January. It was meant to be a new interchange and bridge for Purdey’s Way but we’ve been told now that it will be 2013 before the actual bridge is redone when they’ve got the money to do it. We are concerned that the bridge is unsafe but we are told by Essex County Highways that they are monitoring it weekly and we’ll keep an eye on it that way.  
Of course I had my election this year as well, which took quite a bit of time. General council business takes time as does the Parish Council work. Then we have the Farmer’s Market....

RL: Does the Farmer’s Market actually benefit the shops of Rochford?
Keith: I think it does. It brings a lot of people in from other areas and while they are here they look around the other shops because there are shops in Rochford that they haven’t got in Hockley, say, and of course our own people love it. Visitors also go into the local tea rooms and cafes.
Other things? Sunday morning I was down with Jill at the evacuation centre in Clements Hall because of the Purdey’s Way fire incident, making sure everyone was OK because they had been taken out of the 600 metre exclusion zone.
Last night we had mandatory planning training and I also had a meeting with Virgin Access about our leisure contracts. I know one night recently I had a ‘Shop at my Local’ meeting then went through to the Executive and then left that and went down and joined the  Parish meeting half way through.    

RL: I am encouraged by what you say about ‘Shop at my Local’ because when I talk around, most people don’t know anything about it.  
Keith: Well we are going to have a relaunch in November. It did lose its way a bit because we had no Economic Development Officer so there was nobody pushing it, and we had no Economic Development office at all, so it’s taken a while but that’s now been remedied. We keep trying to advertise it but, I don’t know what it is, whether people aren’t surfing the Net or they think there’s some catch to it. We have also helped shop owners with reducing some business rates.

RL: I saw somewhere the words ‘Town Centre Action Plan’. Is there one for Rochford?
Keith: There should be; I helped write it. There was one written by consultants but we’ve rewritten it. We’ve left in some of the things that just aren’t going to happen – a mutli-storey car park in Back Lane – but we’ve put in things about a year ago that are all do-able. (searching the website we’re only able to find the 2009 one – Keith’s appears to be part of the process that yet needs Council approval)  

RL: OK, can I pick up things you haven’t picked up on, but which your portfolio covered so we can just get a comment or two? In July there were the civil ceremonies at the windmill
Keith: Yes, and the next twenty five of them had a special discount.  

RL: Then in March there were Library cutbacks..
Keith: Yes, which we fought against. We managed to stop them taking whole days out by just cutting hours on different days. We managed not to lose staff but the staff we did have had hours cut back.

RL: I must have got carried away for I went back to September of last year and note you were going to spend £50,000 to deliver the Economic Development Strategy for 2010/11. What’s that gone on?  
Keith: At the moment, nothing. It’s a kind of budget cut. It got used elsewhere, shall we say. We’ve done things before to help business with training; we did the Small Business Grants and we managed to keep the money for it first of all, but like all these things it was a case of, well, we’ve got the money in the budget but can we use it and can we justify using it? So we’ve had to pay out different monies on different things which simply has taken some of that money away. I’ve got to see if I’ve still got a budget for that, but I think I haven’t. We were hoping to do things but as I said a lot of things went down when we lost the team, and we just haven’t been able to do it because we haven’t had the staff to do it with. So, I’m trying to ring-fence that – we start our next budget round next month, so we shall see. I keep on trying to ring-fence the business budget because with the recession coming through, we need to be there. Our new people are very fired up and enthusiastic so we’ll see what we can do.    

RL: Yes, I understand the causes as you’ve explained them, but there is a feeling among some shopkeepers that a little bit of personal encouragement from a face in the Council would help.
Keith: Well yes, that’s what the new Economic Development Officer will do, and that’s why we’ve given her a full-time assistant so he can do stuff in the office while she gets out and about.

RL: Perhaps a penultimate thing, I notice – an Eco-Enterprise Centre in the District?
Keith: Yes, we’re doing a feasibility study on that one but it could be anywhere, it could be Rayleigh because that’s where we have some land to be used, but then I have been in discussion with other people closer to Rochford who may wish to turn other facilities that they have into Enterprise Centres. It would be private and I’ve been approached by different companies who already have facilities in the area. We’ve talked with the Planners and Business Development staff and we’ll carry on discussions so we’re hoping it will come up to a Planning Application.  

RL: Finally, I noticed the words ‘Big Society’ in one document. How do you anticipate that affecting your portfolio.
Keith: We’re hoping that the ‘Shop in your Local’ becomes part of the ‘Big Society’ in that it becomes a community project and will then get its own funding and be self-financing. The idea is that it will grow and be a community resource and people can advertise on it. Hopefully it will get there.

RL: Talking with Jill recently, she said that 65% of Rochford’s population was over retirement age. We’ve been talking about the areas that you cover which includes youth enterprise in business etc. Doesn’t it seem that there is a wealth of experience out there in the retired population waiting to be tapped?    
Keith: We try to get people to volunteer but we find that people don’t want to volunteer. Our figures for voluntary work is very low but in some cases that is because people don’t realise that in some way they are doing voluntary work. If they do shopping for a next door neighbour that is voluntary work but we don’t count it as that. Find a boys’ club or something like that, that is voluntary work, but not many people do that. It’s a strange thing but often when people get to a certain age, a lot of them don’t want to get involved. We find in the Parish, where there are projects, it tends to be the same old faces. We’d love more people to come forward.    

RL: Well, OK, thanks for that. It’s been good getting an update. Perhaps I will ask around about these last matters. Anyway Keith, thank you so much for giving me the only bit of spare space you had this week. It’s very much appreciated.

If you are someone who is retired and would like to find a way that would mean helping the community, why not write in using the e-mail address at the top of the page and we’d love to hear from you with whatever ideas you have.

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