'˜Bexhill needs its own town council'

Carole Woodland, of Cooden Drive, gave an impassioned address to Tuesday night’s meeting of the Bexhill Town Forum.

She urged residents and local groups to get together and push for a town council, in order to ‘put the heart back into Bexhill’ and ‘give Bexhill control over her own destiny’.

She said: “Do you believe that Rother had the residents of Bexhill’s best interests at heart when it put in place the gun turret on the De La Warr Pavilion, Hastings traders in the Colonnade, allowed the old cinema to fall into disrepair and gave us a cemetery-like Western Parade dominated by unsightly waste bins, lumps of concrete and the wooden shower sheds?”

Carole also said she is organising a petition, and pointed out that Battle and Rye residents, who do have town councils, pay £17 a year extra in council tax, which works out as 33 pence a week for town council services.

She said: “With a town council I like to think we have more of a chance of achieving what the residents of Bexhill want.”

The idea of a town council for Bexhill took over most of the meeting, with several people present speaking up in support.

Hugh La Trobe, of Glovers Lane, won his bid to give a 30-minute presentation on the regeneration of Bexhill at the next meeting and said the two issues were linked. “The people of Bexhill have to have a town council. We can’t any longer be under control of Rother.”

Trevor Hawkins, of Clinch Green Avenue, said that Bexhill residents would embrace a town council.

After an overwhelming show of hands in support, Bexhill Town Forum chairman John Black declared the next meeting a ‘town council special’ and promised to invite the chairman of the Sussex Association of Local Councils along to speak on the role of such an organisation.

Rother chief executive Derek Stevens told the Forum the district council could set up a working group to look into the idea.

Forum chairman John Black said the services overview and scrutiny committee work programme was already considering a town council as it fits in with central government’s plans to give more responsibility to local authorities.

Bexhill lost its town council under local government reforms in 1974, instead becoming a Charter Trustees town represented by the Bexhill councillors of Rother District Council.

• The next meeting of Bexhill Town Forum is on Tuesday March 20 2012 at the De La Warr Pavilion at 6.30pm.