Teignbridge Matters

Read Anne Marie’s views in her weekly column; an advertisement sponsored by Conservative supporters.

Muse

I am really pleased to see award winning rock band Muse coming back home to perform at the Den in Teignmouth on 4 and 5 September. It’s great to be able to celebrate a local success story. Muse band members are all former students of Teignmouth Community College and Coombeshead College and after successfully winning a local battle of the bands contest in 1994, Muse took off - and they haven’t looked back. A big thank you to local residents for putting up with noisy nights! Their fifth studio album, The Resistance, is due to be released on 14 September – and we are promised a taster of some of their tracks!

Farming

We need a thriving farming community, not just to preserve our rural way of life, but also to enable us to become more self-sufficient. Our tattered economy needs us to produce something we can sell. The last trade quarter figures to February 2009 show food and drink exports of £3.2 billion set against imports of a whacking great £7.6 billion! More than half of what we eat and drink comes from abroad – that makes no sense economically or for our carbon footprint. We have to find a way of encouraging people to “buy local” – but with a price tag they can afford.

I invited local farmers to a “farmers fry-up breakfast” at Bulleigh Park Farm, kindly hosted by Angela Dallyn and supported by local producers – thank you Westaways for the sausages! – to find out what they thought. They had quite a lot to say! Farmers have endured a tough decade, faced with animal diseases, excessive regulation and rising fuel prices. We need to lift the burden of unnecessary paperwork and inspections and make it easier to buy British by improving food labelling. Farmers need to be listened to – they know better than anyone how to make farming a success.

The local Young Farmers at breakfast, had their own issues – the first of which was how to buy their first piece of farmland. Any farm with a farm house on it is very often sold to be used as a home, not as a working farm, at a price well beyond the reach of a young farmer. A review of the planning use regulations would help. And of course we need to keep agricultural colleges like Seale Hayne open - I am working with the Seale Hayne Future Group to see what can be done.

The Sustainability Agenda

Sustainablility is not just about food – it’s about recognising that resources are not infinite and that we have a role in nurturing and protecting what we have for future generations. Quality of life and environmental issues must be at the heart of politics. We need to reverse the decline in our biodiversity and improve urban green spaces, too often ignored by planners.

The “transition movement” is about local people making their communities more sustainable. Thanks to the initiative of Jackie Brodie and others we now have Transition Town status for Newton Abbot – and successful sustainability projects! I joined Jackie with a team from Conservative Future to help dig the Vicary’s Field Community Garden with fellow transitioners. There are still one or two brambles to clear for any more keen volunteers out there - but the vegetables are now planted and coming through nicely.

We are struggling with a growing mountain of waste. While part of the solution is to provide positive incentives to recycle – rather than hire the rather negative “bin” police, long term it’s about changing our mindset. We need to act before a product becomes waste in the first place – producers should be considering the waste implications when a product is still on the drawing board. There is much to be done – and not much time to do it in.