A visit to Bolsover
Old Bolsover Town Council (OBTC) is the region’s leader in every respect. Most financially prudent, most active, biggest. The best evidence of this is the fact that it was Bolsover who first saw the benefit that the ‘Levelling Up agenda’ could give. They were the first to apply for funding to redevelop part of their town.
As usual, while listening to the discussion, I was looking for information that would relate to our town and increase my knowledge of my work as a councillor. Although the word “Shirebrook” was not mentioned even once, upon further analysis of the discussion, I found a hidden, small, but at the same time meaningful and ambiguous accent from Shirebrook.
If you are from Bolsover and are only interested in Bolsover, then scroll down the screen to the paragraph entitled BOLSOVER STATISTICS, where I start to talk only about my impressions of the visit. Everything between the current sentence and that paragraph is just an introduction focusing on the Shirebrook accent.
DUDE! STAY POSITIVE! BUT HOW???
I promised readers that the articles on S247 would be more optimistic. Still, I would break my integrity as a blogger/journalist by leaving out this Bolsover meeting thread altogether. So I will only present a few sentences describing the issue and some screenshots and leave it to readers to draw their conclusions without a comment on my part.
BEFORE WE BEGIN…
I rarely mention the name of the STC vice-leader on S247, mainly because he rarely appears at “scheduled council meetings”. Below is a photo of a spreadsheet listing attendance at meetings this year. It only takes one glance to realize that Cllr Steve Fritchley is a visitor rather than a regular at the Chamber of STC.
(The attendance statistics above only include ‘scheduled meetings’; the absence of an attendance list for one meeting is due to the lack of minutes from that meeting on the town website).
CONTROVERSY?!? OH NO!
The OBTC meeting started with a controversy. The assembled residents were unhappy, and some were even angry at a particular decision made by the OBTC. I will discuss this later in the report as it has no bearing on our consideration of Cllr Steve Fritchley. What does matter is that this controversy involved the sale of taxpayer-owned land into private hands. During the discussion of this issue, one of the participants said a sentence lit all the red lights I had.
Well, someone in the audience was unaware of the sale and started wondering aloud which developer had bought the land. Finally, one person in the room said: “I hope it’s not Dragonfly!”. This statement immediately provoked a strange reaction in the Chamber. Someone grunted ambiguously, snorted with laughter, a councillor raised his head as if awakened from lethargy, and another councillor looked around nervously.
The statement “I hope it’s not Dragonfly!” was strange but not enough to raise my alarm immediately. Instead, my alarm was raised by the reactions of the assembled people in the room.
MY SPIDER SENSE IS TINGLING!!!
My spider sense tingled! It tingled so hard that right after I returned home, I researched this term with the addition of words ‘developer’; ‘construction’, ‘bolsover’ and several others. The same week, the day before, I was at a meeting in Barlborough, where someone mentioned that a developer working with BDC had declared bankruptcy. What is the name of this developer? Woodhead (something)- the same company that built STC Town Hall and several residential areas in District.
When I started sifting through the documents, I discovered something that… I don’t know how to describe it. So I’m going to take a tea break and return in a bit!
TEA IS GOOD FOR EVERYTHING
So I’m back from my break. While making my favourite Earl Gray, I remembered that I promised you, the reader, in the introduction: I’ll start by showing the documents I found while doing the research, just pointing out what caught my eye in them. No commentary, no hypotheses.
IT’S ALL IN DOCUMENTS!
Let’s start with a link to the government organization registering businesses in the UK: Companies House. There are quite a few companies with ‘dragonfly’ in their name, but if you are persistent, you will eventually find the right one:
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/10314889
If you delve into this page, you will see the basic documents. If you pay a fee- Companies House will send you more documents. I only took the opportunity to browse the free part of the documentation, focusing on just a few documents (even free access gives you a massive amount of papers to read through). Here’s what caught my eye:
And now another document, straight from the BDC website. I’ve included a screenshot of the highlighted ‘curiosity’ below and a link to the full article.
https://www.bolsover.gov.uk/latest-news/758-council-sets-up-new-development-company
No comment. Let’s move on to Bolsover issues now.
BOLSOVER STATISTICS
Before delving into the details of the OBTC meeting, it would be appropriate to show readers the differences between Shirebrook and Bolsover as the largest population centres in the District. I decided to take a shortcut, and instead of writing- I made a summary screen comparing the most interesting financial data. Suppose any reader is interested in the situation in another council. In that case, by clicking the SEARCH panel on the blog and typing in the phrase ‘money’-you will be shown a list of articles with fuller statistics, explanations and my khm khm brilliant commentary.
When I was reporting on the finances of all the Parish Councils in the region, I only had population data from the 2011 census. At the time of writing the current article, the data for 2021 was already available, so I can announce that Bolsover is still the largest town in the region. According to Census 2021, the population of Bolsover is 12,170, and the population of Shirebrook is 10,747.
Another difference is that Shirebrook maintains the Leisure Centre from its taxes, and Bolsover does not. This partly justifies the higher taxes and employment rate, albeit the difference is too significant to be based on actual need.
So how did the other statistics shape up?
GOOD PLACE TO MEET
While on most of my visits I need help finding the venue, this time I found it without any problems. The address indicated on the published agenda is ideally marked on Google Maps. There is plenty of parking around the building. Access to the Chamber is the easiest of all the councils I have visited. Chamber is quiet and big enough to provide space for many people.
PUBLIC PARTICIPATION
As in most of the leading Councils in the region I have visited so far – a group of residents observed the OBTC proceedings. Here is a list of topics covered:
During this part of the meeting, the subject of ‘Dragonfly’ came up. Still, the nail on the head of the agenda was the discussion about selling land belonging to the OBTC to a private company (unfortunately, I can’t remember its name). The assembled residents claimed that no one had been informed about this, there had been no public consultation, and some of the lands had even been sold in violation of the law. According to one of the speaking residents- the law stipulates that tenants of ‘allotments’ must be given one year’s notice before their contracts are terminated.
The funniest part of this passage was when a resident directly asked what the procedure was for selling the land, and none of the councillors answered the question. I’m not going to pretend here – I don’t know that myself. I know there is a procedure, a path that the authority has to follow, but I have too short an experience to know that. I have never witnessed such a process; finding information about it is like jumping head-first into a rabbit hole.
The only piece of land sold at STC while I was there was a piece of land by Lidl, albeit the vote on this was at my second meeting when I didn’t understand what was going on in STC. I suspect that at this point, any legal steps were long since completed, and STC just needed a rubber stamp on that decision.
So how was this controversy resolved in Bolsover? Well, Chair…
CHAIR OF OLD BOLSOVER TOWN COUNCIL
Chairs are like fingerprints-each different. I’ll be honest- I have ambivalent feelings about how the Chair calmed down emotions in the Chamber. Well, as soon as there were questions he didn’t want to answer (claiming it would take too long), he asked the resident raising the issue to set up a separate meeting with him. No one was happy with that solution, but it’s better than nothing.
Coming back to the Chair from OBTC– I have to give him credit for restraining his nerves. Whatever happened, whatever was said – he managed to keep a cool head and the same tone of voice. That may be why he appeased the residents and fended off attacks without much emotion. He resolved the whole situation with a compromise – no one was completely satisfied, but no one could say he was ignored. My guess is that even a face-to-face meeting and explanation will not change the feelings of the residents of the areas adjacent to the sold land.
VISIT FROM COUNCILLOR…
Another difference- a councillor from a higher authority visited the OBTC proceedings. In Shirebrook- our CC councillor never visits the proceedings. No comment.
Unfortunately- I didn’t record the meeting. Today, I can’t remember what topics she raised. I remember she went on for a long time discussing the problems with the BDC website on which the “building permits” planned and discussed by BDC are announced.
I’ve been trying to delve more into BDC matters recently, so I discovered, for example, that someone had applied to turn the old Police Station into a House of Multiple Occupancy (HMO). I remember the controversy surrounding such applications and promises from certain people that there would be no more HMOs in Shirebrook. It remains to be seen how this application will turn out:
https://publicaccess.bolsover.gov.uk/online-applications/applicationDetails.do?keyVal=RKNXXPDD09P00&activeTab=summary
TOWN CLERK
So far, whenever I have sent a request for data to the OBTC, it has always been the Town Clerk of Bolsover who has been first with a response. Always. On top of that- his replies were devoid of any shadow of bias, referrals, or redirections. Whenever I asked something, I immediately received a satisfactory and comprehensive answer. I could write a separate article describing my adventures with Town Clerks in the Bolsover District. Still, that article would not contain a single bad word about the Town Clerk of Bolsover-so far, I have found his style and conduct to be an absolute model of work.
Therefore, I regret that I have noted that this person is planning to leave his post, and the Council has started a search for a replacement. For those considering a career change- I recommend looking at how much the OBTC is offering in salary for a Town Clerk. As I read this announcement, I began to consider my career path, especially as I checked out the required training and career path to becoming a Town Clerk (looks way more manageable than the career path I chose for myself).
I was surprised by how easy it is to climb to the top of this path and how many Town Clerk jobs are currently available in England. If you enjoy working with both people and documents and want to earn very good money, then this is the moment for you to challenge yourself to gain the qualifications required to work as a Town Clerk. Just look at how much pay Bolsover offers:
AGENDA & MINUTES
The documents on the OBTC website are updated regularly – unlike the STC. Therefore, I was able to present how many issues could be discussed during “public participation”. In general- the documentation of the OBTC on their website has so far been exemplary. The agenda was long, but all items were discussed in the time required.
I SHOULD RECORD THAT MEETING
Unfortunately, this meeting was quite a long time ago, and I didn’t have time to describe it right after, so I based the entire article above on a few sentences I wrote down right after the meeting. Unfortunately, many of the things I usually paid attention to were missing from these notes. For example, I remember that, like other Chairs, the Chair of OBTC had a catchphrase, but unfortunately, I didn’t write it down, and now I can’t remember what that sentence was.
I also forgot to write down a list of the most important matters discussed. I could check it in the published minutes, but this article is already too long, so if you want to see what was being said, I recommend visiting the Bolsover website. You can find the link to the minutes of this meeting here:
https://www.oldbolsovertowncouncil.gov.uk/uploads/11th-october-2022-18.pdf
COUNCIL COMPOSITION
I was surprised when during the preparation for publication, I checked the composition of the OBTC. First of all: although this council is larger than STC, they have as many as four seats less in the composition. Their good financial situation can also be explained in one sentence: out of 12 councillors, as many as nine are independent, and only three are from the Labour Party.
FACEBOOK
So far, I have not checked whether the council I visit has something more than the town’s website on the Internet. Looking for a good photo that could illustrate the article, I found Bolsover’s profile on Facebook. Thousands of photos to choose from, the latest information, and an archive of what has happened in the town. I admit that I was surprised how few “likes” their page has (only 800 more than the S247 fan page), but the mere fact that someone wants to advertise the activities of residents and authorities is most praiseworthy.
https://www.facebook.com/oldbolsover/photos
SUM IT UP!
That Bolsover is the region’s leader is no coincidence. If I were to describe what I think is the genesis of this situation, I would plunge again into the sad conclusions I have about STC and BDC. So I won’t elaborate.
Instead, I will sum it up like this: Shirebrook has potential that can only be unleashed by new people coming in from outside the usual group that holds power in town. Shirebrook desperately needs fresh, younger blood. The recent mistakes Labour councillors have made will cast a dark shadow over the future of STC. Of course, these mistakes are “exempt”, so I cannot write about them.
Sylwester Zwierzynski info@shirebrook247.com
