Our Friday miscellany of the week's news and events

If there’s an easy way and a hard way to do things, your can lay money on Boston Borough Council opting for the hard way. Now that the implications of the plan for an extra wheelie bin for green waste are becoming clearer, we can begin to glimpse the minefield that awaits. Residents will have the option to buy a bin for £20 - or not have their garden waste collected at all. That's because, if  they haven't forked out the twenty quid, they cannot put garden waste in their green bin as they used to. People with small gardens have been told that they can share the cost of a bin with a neighbour or two. The potential of that as a source of disputes is probably quite considerable. As always, the council is selective in its choice of words – saying that the idea of a third bin was widely supported by participants in last year’s green waste pilot - but failing to add was that these people did not approve of the plan to pay a charge for the bin. And yet again the word discrimination is being levelled at the leadership in cases where people need a bin but perhaps cannot afford it. With so much practice at messing ideas up, you would think that the BAGIBs (boys and girls in blue) might at last be able to organise a booze-up in a brewery. Think again!
Still talking rubbish – the council that is, not us – we note the impending arrival of the annual Big Boston Clean Up. Whilst this is a praiseworthy scheme, it does highlight how ineffective the council’s daily efforts to keep our streets looking clean and tidy are. It would not surprise us to learn that this year’s event collects more rubbish than ever -  as it is clear that there is a growing disregard by people of the need to put their litter in an appropriate receptacle. The partnership between Boston Borough Council and the Boston Standard to publish CCTV photographs of people seen dropping litter in the street seems to have produced little by way of results this time around, and certainly, once you leave the town centre, litter becomes the rule, rather than the exception. How long before the Big Boston Clean Up becomes twice yearly – or even more frequent, we wonder?
In the normal way of things, when we heard that Boston Borough Council is to undergo a “warts and all” peer review, we would order in extra supplies of Compound W. But somehow, we feel that the council wouldn’t be announcing such an exercise if it wasn’t fairly confident of the outcome.

The so-called peer challenge - which sounds more like a reality TV show involving the House of Lords - is the final recommendation of the Improvement Board which took the council in hand back in the days of the Boston Bypass Independents. Regular readers will recall that the board signed the council off shortly after last May’s elections,  and that the Tory leadership tried to fudge the announcement so that it appeared that the improvements were down to them – rather than the BBI, even though that clearly could not have been the case. The three day visit – between March 20th and 22nd  - will be a “broad brush” affair with a verbal report on the final day followed by an in-depth written report. Will we be told the outcome, we wonder? And will the leadership break with the long standing tradition of keeping opposition parties away from the action – as has been the case with some other outside visits?

We note from the local newspapers that Boston is to host an “immigration summit” after council leader Peter Bedford invited representatives from other Lincolnshire councils to a meeting in the series of Task and Finish Group discussions on the issue. It comes as the level of debate continues to increase. Chris Pain, the Boston and Skegness area chairman for UKIP, warned  at the party's spring conference in Skegness at the start of the month, that unlimited mass EU migration had severely affected the area. And he sought to dispel the suggestion made by Councillor Bedford and others - including our MP Mark Simmonds – that local people did not want the jobs being done by the migrant community. “It is often the case that a British person answers an advert, by telephone, for a menial job only to be told that the position has been filled. They can ring back five minutes later and adopt a fake foreign accent and get an interview or be offered the job straight away,” he says. “Local people will do these jobs, but they are not even being given a chance to work in their own country ... the wages are being kept artificially low, with the migrants getting paid a lot less money than the British people were getting paid 28 years ago for the same work.” Worryingly, he adds: “It is difficult for people to believe that in Boston, we have No Go Areas, where public houses and restaurants are owned by foreigners, and only their own countrymen are welcomed. Numerous complaints are received about this, and their actions have created frictions in the once friendly and quiet neighbourhoods.” If these claims are correct – then here are two issues that should definitely be on the agenda for the “summit.”
As Lincolnshire County Council presses the pause button on funding for the proposed Boston flood protection barrier, we note with no sense of irony the announcement of plans for new road through Lincoln city centre. The project is part of a masterplan to encourage growth in the city, along with improving traffic and transport links. Construction of the road is likely to start in 2014 and take two years. Perhaps that’s why County Hall is thinking again before spending any more money on Boston.
It’s soon going to become something of a game - called “spot the shops that are leaving Boston.” This week a reader noted the disappearance of the It must be stolen shop in the Market Place, whilst a local estate agent is advertising the lease of the Blockbuster video shop in West Street.

Let’s hope it doesn’t echo most of the properties that change hands  in the street and become another shop/off licence. The number of premises not for sale in Boston town centre beggars belief. Meanwhile a prominent local webpage is even suggesting that Marks and Spencer is planning on pulling out of town. Silly?That's what they thought in Skegness and Grantham.


A  number of readers responded to Monday’s report on the proposed women’s refuge in the Main Ridge East Neighbourhood Steering Group area. The details of Mayflower Housing's “consultation” with neighbours is still an issue. A spokesman for the group said that as far as the consultation with immediate neighbours was concerned,  there appeared to have been only two households canvassed -  one who objected and intended  to protest in writing to the council, and  another where the house was rented by foreign nationals with limited English skills. The spokesman added: “As to CCTV, under the Data Protection Act, CCTV can only cover the premises concerned and cannot film the public on the park or roadway.” Interestingly, whilst we agreed to a request by Mayflower to keep the location of the proposed hostel as vague as possible, several readers took no time at all to find it in the list of applications to the borough's  planning department. One wrote: “Surely Mayflower has a duty of care to these women? Allowing the location of such a refuge to come into the public domain has compromised the security of these women before they have set foot on the premises. Such incompetence does not bode well for the women who will be needing their services in future.”
At last, the year is up – and next week will see the long awaited report on how much Boston BID has achieved since the Task and Finish Group report recommended that it be more open with members. We won’t spoil your enjoyment,  as we will be reporting in detail next week, but we have to say that the BID’s so-called report reveals that nothing seems to have changed much – other than a bit of tweaking. There are also one or two claims that are worth a second look. As we say, more on that next week.
Something that the BID might like to take a look at is a website called Totally Locally.

The people who produce it say: “Totally Locally is a multi-award winning campaign that makes our towns that little bit better by celebrating local shops, businesses and people. Totally Locally is free to any town that wants it. We work alongside shop and business owners, or people who just want to improve their towns.” The story so far? If you visit the site and search for Boston – you won’t find it!
Earlier in the week we mentioned the problems encountered using the new Boston Borough website and how so called transparency sections had proved anything but. Initially, we were told that the fault lay at our own doorstep - because we had apparently been remiss in updating the latest Adobe software which would have made these pages accessible. When we pointed out that this was not the case, it emerged that the borough's IT department was working on the assumption that the world and his wife still depended on Microsoft Explorer as their browser of choice. The fact is that Explorer is favoured  by around 20%  of internet users, according to some statisticians. The problem is now solved to all intents and purposes. But there is still the worry that in language terms, the borough is writing in Latin, whilst the rest of us are using English!
We love the acronyms that our local council comes up with – and the list seems almost limitless. A report up for discussion next week on the adoption of open spaces in the borough,  offers these three gems: LAP – a Local Area for Play; LEAP - Local Equipped Area for Play and NEAP – a Neighbourhood Equipped Area for Play. What we need now is a Big Open Unequipped Neighbourhood Development Site -  and  then we can do things in LEAPS and BOUNDS!
Not for the first time, we are indebted to the Boston Standard for the introduction of  another word into the English language. Poultergeist?” Some one who scares easily in the presence of the supernatural, perhaps – they certainly sound to be a bit chicken!
You can write to us at boston.eye@googlemail.com Your e-mails will be treated in confidence and published anonymously if requested.Our former blog is archived at: http//bostoneyelincolnshire.blogspot.com