HEATHFIELD PARTNERSHIP TRUST COMPANY LTD
AGM CHAIRMANS REPORT 2009
A very warm welcome to all of our guests this evening. This has become a welcome opportunity to present the work of the Partnership over the preceding year and to formally express our thanks to the many Partners who have contributed to our programmes.
I would now welcome some distinguished Guests who represent organizations that have particularly worked well with us. The Chairman of the Parish Council, Cllr Peter Newnham, the Chairman of the Chamber of Trade & Commerce, Mr Trevor Goldsmith and the Secretary of the Heathfield Area Rotary, Mr George Claydon. Elected Members, County Councillor Chris Dowling, District Councillors Dick Angel & Niki Oakes. Parish Councillors, John Kerby, & Jean Holmwood. Sgt Ruth Hammerton in charge of the Heathfield Police Force.
The Annual General meeting of the Trust Company is where we conduct the formal Governance of the Company, its annual accounts and the appointment of Directors and this now traditional annual account by way of the Chairman’s report. I would also thank Alan Staples of Manningtons who acts as our Auditor who sadly cannot be here tonight.
I would also welcome our Directorate, Deputy Chairman and Company Secretary John Tolley, Honorary Treasurer, Tim Hough, Directors, Jack Hampton, Alan Powell, Colin Williams and of course the aforementioned Trevor Goldsmith. Rosemary Mays-Smith cannot be with us this evening as she is supporting her Husband at an occasion in London. One notable absentee is former Director, Teresa Blaxland, who stood down at the end of the summer after many years of outstanding service. Teresa had become a magistrate a number of years ago and now is undertaking more senior roles on the circuit. She has also undertaken a Board position, her husband became seriously ill and she was feeling no longer able to give her absolute commitment to chairing the ICT Committee and also the Partnership Executive. I have written to her expressing the Board’s deep gratitude for her length of service but most of all for her intellectual contributions and strategic thinking which had been invaluable on so many occasions.
I would also like to pay tribute to our Officers who have given such excellent service to the Partnership this year. Sue Roach who contributes to the Web-site editorial, Karen Cook who looks after the Sport & Leisure, High Street and Transport Committees, Sheran Thorpe, who is recording all for us this evening also records the minutes for the Board, the Partnership Executive, the Police LATs and the Farmer’s Market Committee. Once again a special mention for Joanne Aldous our Co-ordinator who has had an outstanding year ensuring that the objectives of the Partnership are executed to greatest effect. We continue to be an effective operation due in no small part to Joanne’s dedication and professional approach to all the work we do. She looks after the minutes for the I.T. Committee, the Inward Investment Committee, completes all of the Partnership bidding forms, all monitoring reports, manages the Town information Boards, contributes considerably to the website management, co-ordinates press releases, produces the shoppers guide and creatively sets up the stands at the Parish Assembly and Le Marche stalls. She also runs a bus company but more of that later.
Managing me has perhaps been her biggest challenge and gentle reminders pepper my e-mail in-tray and answerphone most often with needs for text for this report or that bid or dates and times for meetings. I would thank her for the long suffering patience and impeccable support that she provides me in my attempts to represent the Partnership organization as a whole.
This evening is an opportunity to report on the work of the entire operation and its endeavours over the last year. In almost every case each project will have been a collective approach with some other organization or frequently several. I will try and recognize all such contributions when reporting on the individual programmes.
IT
I will start with the IT committee as it has been the leadership of Teresa Blaxland that has steered this ship for some considerable time. There are two principle dimensions to its work. Firstly the maintenance and improvement in service of our PiPs throughout the Town and surrounds. We have 6 machines in total and they are spread out as follows:-The COOP, the Youth Centre, The Library, The Crown Pub, the Half Moon Pub and the Wessons Café in Horam. Deliberately diverse locations to be as accessible as possible to the Public we serve. We still have ambition to find a location in Broad Oak. During the year these machines have been simplified and some of the supplementary attachments have been removed to improve the reliability and smooth running of these complicated computers. In addition we have been piloting a WI-FI service at one of these instillations and this is now working but again needs a longer trial period before we can offer the service as we would like to do, at all of our stations. One of the challenges we face is the protection against inappropriate sites on any of these public services. This calls for extraordinary programming which takes time and money but the caution is considered by us, to be the only responsible course of action. I would like here to highlight the extraordinary support we have had from Stefan Danielczyk and the County Council. So many technical challenges that he has attended to with calm and professional assurance and in so many cases not costed the bills to the Partnership.
The second dimension is of course the Heathfield .net web-site. This has undertaken a monumental upgrade and a revolutionary step forward in sophistication over the last year. The lay-out and design have changed dramatically, features appear within much more accessible buttons and the whole operation is far more user friendly. As a communication tool for the community as a whole it is now magnificent and of course still improving, evolving and meeting the expressed needs of the general public.
During this year the brand new business and shopping site has been launched which has been one of the major objectives right from the outset. The sophistication of the search engine is truly remarkable and usually the jealously guarded asset of only the richest of global companies. It has taken a lot of work from Sue Roach and most certainly Joanne Aldous but it has been a labour of love from Nick Potter of 21st Century. His generous contribution to the programming of this site and its complete overhaul and new presentation has been herculean and the business site, the absolute highlight.
We made the re-launch coincide with Le Marche and took a stand at the show. I would pay a tribute to the management team behind Le Marche, a magnificent effort especially Mike Woodhouse. We should also remember Gill Temple and the Twinning Association for their remarkable support and accommodation programme. The idea for us using this occasion being that the rural hinterland of Heathfield come to Le Marche in large numbers and this publicity of their Market Town and a site that broadcasts all about its assets, services and businesses would be of mutual value. We also ran a game to guess the number of hits the site got in August (not yet known at that time) as we did not get the figures until the next week and a second bid for September. All bids were free and for fun but £50 prizes for the winners of both competitions.
We now have detailed monitoring statistics on visitors, where they came from and the pages they visited and for what length of time. This is useful as we were earlier in the year able to identify the number of hits achieved by Scatts which was hugely impressive.
I was very pleased to reach agreement with the Courier Group and their Managing Director, Richard Karn that we could publish selected Courier photographs on Heathfield.net of Heathfield events provided we credited the source. We are delighted to do that as it should add to the immediacy and impact of our news page.
We launched an “access to advice and guidance” section at the heart of the credit crunch impact. This provides a single site access to all known services for private citizens, Families and also businesses to turn to in moments of need. We included advice regarding the symptoms of liquidation and thank Nick Redman, Financial Director of Rix & Kay for his professional expertise. This is to help prioritize the most important factors when businesses are under pressure. I would commend the WDC Housing department for their immediate understanding and appreciation of what we were doing and why and their 1st class response and creative thinking.
The History site is now up and running and is a brilliantly researched concentration of all known history of the area taking us back to Roman and Medieval times. A scholarly piece of work by Joanne.
The Youth site is now dynamic with a mega gallery of photographs, agony aunt and recipe features and about to go into a new phase of live bands performing.
The next two sites to get an injection of energy will be the education site with all schools introducing their profiles and the tourism site where we hope to work with WDC and we have a meeting coming up with their representative consultant. Heathfield.net stickers, pole tags and window posters will be used during the year to market this now excellent service. We have car stickers for everyone who wants one this evening. We are also clearly going to be working closely with Action in Rural Sussex regarding promotion of Heathfield Schemes and the web-site will be prominent amongst them. I should say a thank you to Barbara Beaton of AIRS who spent a shift with us on the stand at Le Marche and John Tolley who stood steadfastly by to the end of the day. Joanne had of course set it up in seemingly the early hours and ensured it was stacked with information on a very good looking display. She had wonderful help from her Mother and they were both dressed in orchestrated outfits as if Glamorous Stewardesses from the finest of international Airlines. Another vote of thanks to Paul Clark a member of the Inward Investment Committee and the owner of the Pet Shop who gave us access to his shop for water and water closets during what turned out to be a very hot day.
INWARD INVESTMENT
Mention of Paul Clark can take us into the work of the Inward Investment Committee. This committee continues to work tirelessly to promote the business interests of all enterprises within the Parish Boundaries of Heathfield & Waldron. The Business web-site is in close collaboration between the IT and II committees. In this tough economic climate we went out of our way to provide additional assistance to companies wanting web-links to their own business site. One of the difficulties faced by all small and medium sized enterprises is that marketing either comes low on their list of priorities or does not figure at all.
Trying to move a Town of various organizations into a momentum of promotion has been an interesting challenge. A major triumph has been the initiative set for this October and lead by the Chamber of Commerce and particularly Trevor Goldsmith and that is a substantial campaign on Sovereign Radio. I am delighted to say that the Chamber have backed this with all their might but most impressively 20 local businesses are pulling their weight and that has not been achieved before. I am also pleased that the Partnership and Parish Council are also making a contribution and to steal a line from another organization recently:- the imagery presented will be of Heathfield “all in this together.” Each business gets 60 x 15 second ads in the month and in turn they will frame a corporate 30 second advertisement extolling the virtues of shopping in Heathfield and using Heathfield.net. By the end of the month, anybody who listens to that station should be on our wavelength!
The new edition of the Business and Shoppers Guide brochure is currently being put together and will be launched in the Christmas edition of the Heathfield First. The Chamber have vowed to keep this going and the Partnership is looking to find ways and means to sustain it. One triumphant piece of news is the announcement by the Leader of the District Council that whatever the strain on finances, the District Council face in the immediate future, car parking charges will simply not be an option. That was witnessed by Trevor Goldsmith and Graeme Hird and myself as we were attending a recent meeting with Wealden Chambers of Commerce regarding the viability of our Market Towns. It was refreshing and shows great credit to Cllr Pam Doodes who clearly understands the economy of the Market Towns and their importance in the District.
Much of this year we have as a committee, spent a great deal of time working in conjunction with WDC regarding the new Local Development Framework. This will set the plan for development in the District up to and surely beyond 2026. Our interests centre as you would expect within the Heathfield area and we have maintained dialogue with Nigel Eveleigh the strategic development Manager in person and with correspondence over the last year. We have contributed a full response to the consultation on the Core strategy, the spatial development and sustainability appraisal. We will be maintaining that dialogue over this coming year. In an important representation it is key to note that the Chairman of the Chamber of Trade and the Chairman of the Parish Council are both members of this Committee. With regard to the LDF process I would commend WDC for the exhibition made to the Public in the Youth Centre and the efforts of the Parish Council to put on a presentation in the Community Centre and to Councillor Dick Angel for making that presentation. All have constructively set out to provide as much guidance and information as possible. Now comes the difficult bit, especially with the proposed housing deployments and then the conflicts of interests will fly.