Year 2, Week 37
Council budget, Area Committee, Regeneration funding, garage rent, roads, Common Good Engagement Group ...
My apologies that this week’s post is late. I went down to Hampshire by train last weekend to visit my 89 year old father and the trip back took two days as my personal blog post records. I also have a lot of things to tell you about so I think I will leave some until next week’s post as this is going to be a long one anyway.
Council budget
I continue to attend many meetings where we try to thrash out the council budget for 2024/25. As part of this exercise the council invited the public to have their say on their budget challenge. The public had the option of submitting a budget through the budget simulator or filling in a survey. The council received around 2,500 responses to these plus 200 suggestions from staff.
So today we are entering phase two “Budget Challenge 2024/25 - Tell Us More” and you’re being invited to tell us more. Here’s a video introducing it.
You can find a lot more information here and I urge you to participate as there’s a lot of suggestions that have come out of the first round which I think people will find challenging to say the least.
Nairnshire Area Committee
Your Area Committee met on Monday and discussed and agreed various things. You can watch the whole meeting here on YouTube and all the papers can be found here. I’ll cover some key issues below.
Community Regeneration Fund
We had £73,842.24 from a variety of external funding sources to allocate to projects in the ward. We had previous agreed to ring fence £57,748.71 towards the project to provide new toilets at the end of Harbour Street which left £16,083.53 to give out and we agreed to give £11,000 to NICE towards the TeamHamish Links Regeneration Phase 2 (the tiered seating and other works in the bowl of land in front of James’ cafe) and the remainder towards a Nairn BID project to create a Nairn Heritage Trail.
Garage rents
This is a bit of a thorny issue. The council has 34 garages and 63 garage sites (land on which someone usually erects a garage) in the ward, all but one of which currently has a tenant. These were all originally for use by council house tenants but many are now rented by others and currently only 17 are rented by council tenants, the other 80 by non-tenants.
These “garages” are, in reality, storage units and in preparation for this item we asked officers to look at the rent compared to both other council wards and also commercial storage companies. They told us that rents in our ward are low compared to elsewhere in Highland Council and also significantly cheaper that commercial units so with this in mind we agreed an increase of 20%.
The money raised goes into the Housing Revenue Account so helps fund the upkeep of the Council’s housing stock - which has to be funded by rent of both homes and garages so this increase, mainly on non-tenants, will benefit tenants.
Roads Capital Programme 2024/5
We agreed a proposed programme of road improvements around Nairn in the next financial year. This is all a bit theoretical at the moment as it depends on the outcome of the council budget which is still to be agreed but the proposal is to spend £271,890 across the ward with the top priority being surface dressing of the B9007 and surface dressing on Lochloy Road being second. A complete list can be found in appendix 2 of this document.
Nairn Common Good Engagement Group
For a while now we have been proposing to set up an “engagement group” so that we can get the informal views of groups with an interest in the Nairn Common Good on how we should manage the assets.
To take a simple example in my time on the council we have “disposed” (i.e. sold) two assets of the Common Good: the Grant Street Yard and a strip of land next to the Seaman’s Hall in Harbour Street. Each disposal legally requires a community consultation, and we consulted twice in the case of the former.
Formal consultations cost the Common Good quite a lot of money so it would make sense to get a “wet finger” view of whether people were likely to favour disposal before proceeding to full consultation.
We also have to make many other decisions on the management of the Common Good and again it would be good to be able to take sounding before we four ward councillors, as custodians of the Common Good, decide how to proceed. For example we had a request recently from a group who wanted to put a memorial on The Links and we deferred that until the engagement group was created so that we could informally consult on whether this was a good idea.
Before we went ahead with creating this engagement group officers consulted with groups in the town who we thought might be interested in being involved and they reported back on the results of that at Area Committee. I was disappointed with many of the very negative responses and said as much when we got to this item.
Councillor Fraser, who followed me, said that I had summed things up very well and he wasn’t optimistic but he reluctantly said that we should go ahead with this group, and we agreed to do that for two years, with a review after one year to see if we wanted to continue into the second year.
Ward Manager
This Area Committee meeting was the last to be attended by our current ward manager. Lewis Hannah, who some of you may have encountered in his time with us. He has been ward manager for the Nairn & Cawdor and Badenoch & Strathspey wards since before I joined the council but as part of a re-organisation of the Community Support and Engagement Team he is off to work out of Dingwall looking after wards on the other side of the Moray
He has done an excellent job so his move is a great loss and I would like to take this opportunity to thank him for his help and support to me in my time on the council.
From next month our two wards will join the Inverness wards as a group supported by David Haas assisted by Mark MacKay and Mark Greig. We’re still waiting to hear more about how this will work in practice.
Council house rents
Council house rents will rise by 7.95% for the next year, an increase of between £246.24 and £393.12 a year. The “supplemental service charge” to tenants moving into new build housing will also rise to £15 from the current starting level of £11.84 per week – a 21% rise.
Planning applications
The following new applications were logged since I last posted (this is two weeks’ worth of applications):
23/05795/FUL - Land South Of Craigellachie Cottage, Wester Galcantray, Cawdor - Erection of house (Amended house type 17/01652/FUL)
23/05910/FUL - Land 915M SW Of Nairn Golf Club, Seabank Road, Nairn - Erection of new greenkeepers welfare facilities and associated infrastructure
23/05957/FUL - Hay Lodge, 8 Crescent Road, Nairn, IV12 4NB - Erection of garage with ancillary annexe to upper floor (family use)
23/05929/LBC - 6 High Street, Nairn, IV12 4BJ - External alterations - alterations to windows and doors, formation of access, private garden; Internal alterations - remove partition walls, partially reduce floor height and reconfigure layout
Internal alterations to remove partition walls, partially reduce floor height and reconfigure layout to create 1 bedroom apartment
23/05930/FUL - 6 High Street, Nairn, IV12 4BJ - Change of use from retail (class 1) to self catered staff accommodation for Waverley Hotel (class 7)
23/05970/FUL - Land 520M NE Of Blairnafade, Nairn - Refurbishment of cottage, erection of workshop and extension
24/00049/FUL - Saorsa, Victoria Street, Nairn, IV12 4HH - Erection of car port
To find details search on the reference number on the planning portal where you can also find details on how to comment.