Local Government
Rochford District Council
Rochford District Council
Councillor Heather Glynne The Laurels
Lincoln Road
Rochford
Essex
SS4 3AF
Interview with Councillor Heather Glynn (19th October 2010)
As you may have gathered if you have read Rochford Life, we seek to focus on people and through them the workings of the Community. Heather is both a Parish Councillor and a District Councillor and here she talks about her wider life and then something of the working of the District Council. You’ll catch a flavour of the history of the area along the way! (We hope to do interviews with other members and officers of the Council in the days to come to show you more and more the life and workings of our local authority).
Rochford Life: You do talks around the place. Tell me about them.
Heather: Well it all started when I retired from work, I used to go out and judge cakes for W.I.s and that sort of thing and one day a lady said to me, “What do you do for a hobby?” because this was before I was a councillor, and so I said, “Well actually I collect Dutch clogs,” so she said, “Oh give us a talk on it.” That was the start of it. As to the clogs, I have a clog that is small as my thumb nail and I have great big ones. Now I’ve got about 500 of them. I’ve also got some china ones as well. Then after that, somebody said what else can you do, so I actually do a talk on Southend High Street from the railway bridge to the top of Pier Hill in the 40’s with the shops that were there then and the shops that are there now. There is another one I do called ‘Cobweb Corner’ which is all to do with round the Victoria Circus, the trolley bus routes. I do one of a Royal Garden Party because I’ve been to one. I’ll do these for anyone, pensioners, Cruise, Salvation Army, W.I.s, anyone. It’s only by word of mouth. My latest one is ‘Games we Played when we were Children’. The most important thing, I feel, is that wherever I leave after one of these talks, people are talking to each other and reminding one another of the past and something happy. I suppose I’ve been doing them seventeen or eighteen years.
RL: You spoke about when you retired. Where was that from?
Heather: Well I worked for the North East London Polytechnic. I ran the Catering at the Barking complex which is now the University of East London
RL: OK, let’s move on to talk about your life on the Council.
Heather: Well, I am the second longest serving member of Rochford District Council. The longest is Chris Black, a Lib Dem from Rayleigh. I used to be with them; I did twelve years with them and then four years on my own and then the Conservatives asked me to join them because of my knowledge of history of the area, so eventually I did join them.
RL: So why are you on the District Council, what is your personal reason for being there?
Heather: Well in the beginning, at the time of the first District Plan, I live in what is called the plot lands that cover Hockley, Ashingdon and Hawkwell and all my near neighbours, there were eight properties, were worried about future development. Everybody was saying we were a ‘white area’, an area for development near the airport, and there was dispute about white area and greenbelt, and I got so fed up that I went round everyone and said if I put a proposal in for future development, have I your permission to represent you, and all but one agreed to it.
I had done a Certificate in Management Studies at the Polytechnic and so I knew how to lay it out and I got a friend to type it out and then submitted it and it went to appeal . We got congratulated by the Inspector at the end. The area which is now Magnolia Nature Reserve became a buffer zone and we lost – but we were congratulated on how we did it and that was the beginning of it. I got interested and sat through every day of the Inspector’s investigation and I was so fascinated that that is how I got into it.
What do I get out of it? Lots of satisfaction. It’s the everyday things: people phone me up or even write to me and people want to know things to do with planning, to do with all sorts of subject, anything really, and as a District Councillor I can go and get information quicker than they can – it may take them months – and I will say I will look into it for you, I will be honest with the answer I give you. It might not be what you want but at least you’ve been listened to, and that’s how I work. I get satisfaction from the day to day things.
RL: How often does the District Council meet?
Heather: When I first went on it, we had a Chairman of the authority, and a Vice-Chairman, and then we had someone who was not really the leader but the main person from the main party and then we had different committees, but when I joined it was when it was all being broken up. There had been just about a thousand members of staff on the authority but when I went on it, it had gone down in 1990 to something like about two hundred and fifty employees, because all the leisure had gone out to a private company, which was made up of officers of the council, and the refuse collection had also gone out to an outside company and various other parts as well, so instead of having all these departments, they had gone off. It was the beginning of a complete change of local government and it also meant that the senior officers who had been paid for managing a thousand people were now managing far less and so, over time, the office side, not the members of the council, but the officers, changed dramatically, and I was involved with the beginning of that changing over.
I found it very interesting and at that stage, back then before the changes, we had a planning or development committee, and also what you call general purposes, we had leisure, we had finance, and so we had about five committees and all the members could sit on various ones and then at the end it was a majority vote for what happened and then it would have gone to the full council and was ratified, completely different to today.
That worked for some years while I was there, and then of course in the last six or seven years the whole thing has changed and you now have a leader of the Council. When it changed you could have a mayor, or you could have a leader plus a group like cabinet ministers and so on. We stayed with our committees until we were more or less forced into changing over and so now you have a leader, and a deputy leader, and he or she appoints the other seven. It’s not by voting for people; the leader of the Council decides who will be on that inner group and each councillor tends operate on a political basis.
You do have various lower committees and the only area where it is voted who is chairman is in the three area committees which is East, Central and West. It’s how Central Government decided how local government shall work, so each area has two tiers, the cabinet member tier and the ordinary member tier, and I am an ordinary member, and one of the things they hope you will do, as I said at the beginning, is talk to the public. You have group meetings of the various political parties who meet and then it comes to full council. There are at present, one independent member, one Green Party member, five Liberals, and 32 Conservative members, so there are only the two groups, because a group has to be two or more.
At this point we changed over to discussing the Parish Council so you can find the continuation on the Rochford Parish Council pages. CLICK HERE
As you may have gathered if you have read Rochford Life, we seek to focus on people and through them the workings of the Community. Heather is both a Parish Councillor and a District Councillor and here she talks about her wider life and then something of the working of the District Council. You’ll catch a flavour of the history of the area along the way! (We hope to do interviews with other members and officers of the Council in the days to come to show you more and more the life and workings of our local authority).
Rochford Life: You do talks around the place. Tell me about them.
Heather: Well it all started when I retired from work, I used to go out and judge cakes for W.I.s and that sort of thing and one day a lady said to me, “What do you do for a hobby?” because this was before I was a councillor, and so I said, “Well actually I collect Dutch clogs,” so she said, “Oh give us a talk on it.” That was the start of it. As to the clogs, I have a clog that is small as my thumb nail and I have great big ones. Now I’ve got about 500 of them. I’ve also got some china ones as well. Then after that, somebody said what else can you do, so I actually do a talk on Southend High Street from the railway bridge to the top of Pier Hill in the 40’s with the shops that were there then and the shops that are there now. There is another one I do called ‘Cobweb Corner’ which is all to do with round the Victoria Circus, the trolley bus routes. I do one of a Royal Garden Party because I’ve been to one. I’ll do these for anyone, pensioners, Cruise, Salvation Army, W.I.s, anyone. It’s only by word of mouth. My latest one is ‘Games we Played when we were Children’. The most important thing, I feel, is that wherever I leave after one of these talks, people are talking to each other and reminding one another of the past and something happy. I suppose I’ve been doing them seventeen or eighteen years.
RL: You spoke about when you retired. Where was that from?
Heather: Well I worked for the North East London Polytechnic. I ran the Catering at the Barking complex which is now the University of East London
RL: OK, let’s move on to talk about your life on the Council.
Heather: Well, I am the second longest serving member of Rochford District Council. The longest is Chris Black, a Lib Dem from Rayleigh. I used to be with them; I did twelve years with them and then four years on my own and then the Conservatives asked me to join them because of my knowledge of history of the area, so eventually I did join them.
RL: So why are you on the District Council, what is your personal reason for being there?
Heather: Well in the beginning, at the time of the first District Plan, I live in what is called the plot lands that cover Hockley, Ashingdon and Hawkwell and all my near neighbours, there were eight properties, were worried about future development. Everybody was saying we were a ‘white area’, an area for development near the airport, and there was dispute about white area and greenbelt, and I got so fed up that I went round everyone and said if I put a proposal in for future development, have I your permission to represent you, and all but one agreed to it.
I had done a Certificate in Management Studies at the Polytechnic and so I knew how to lay it out and I got a friend to type it out and then submitted it and it went to appeal . We got congratulated by the Inspector at the end. The area which is now Magnolia Nature Reserve became a buffer zone and we lost – but we were congratulated on how we did it and that was the beginning of it. I got interested and sat through every day of the Inspector’s investigation and I was so fascinated that that is how I got into it.
What do I get out of it? Lots of satisfaction. It’s the everyday things: people phone me up or even write to me and people want to know things to do with planning, to do with all sorts of subject, anything really, and as a District Councillor I can go and get information quicker than they can – it may take them months – and I will say I will look into it for you, I will be honest with the answer I give you. It might not be what you want but at least you’ve been listened to, and that’s how I work. I get satisfaction from the day to day things.
RL: How often does the District Council meet?
Heather: When I first went on it, we had a Chairman of the authority, and a Vice-
That worked for some years while I was there, and then of course in the last six or seven years the whole thing has changed and you now have a leader of the Council. When it changed you could have a mayor, or you could have a leader plus a group like cabinet ministers and so on. We stayed with our committees until we were more or less forced into changing over and so now you have a leader, and a deputy leader, and he or she appoints the other seven. It’s not by voting for people; the leader of the Council decides who will be on that inner group and each councillor tends operate on a political basis.
You do have various lower committees and the only area where it is voted who is chairman is in the three area committees which is East, Central and West. It’s how Central Government decided how local government shall work, so each area has two tiers, the cabinet member tier and the ordinary member tier, and I am an ordinary member, and one of the things they hope you will do, as I said at the beginning, is talk to the public. You have group meetings of the various political parties who meet and then it comes to full council. There are at present, one independent member, one Green Party member, five Liberals, and 32 Conservative members, so there are only the two groups, because a group has to be two or more.
At this point we changed over to discussing the Parish Council so you can find the continuation on the Rochford Parish Council pages. CLICK HERE
To return to the Rochford District Council front page, please CLICK HERE