Langar cum Barnstone Parish Council

11th May  2010 Update

New Village Hall and Sports Field Project

Works Lane, Barnstone

The first very important thing to say about this project is that it is still very much alive and kicking, in spite of the fact that there is still no visible evidence of anything happening.

Funding

All over the country villages have benefitted from large sums of money from the Big Lottery Fund (BLF) - Colston Bassett getting their lovely new hall nearly ten years ago, as did Kinoulton at about the same time. Not quite so nationwide, but still over a large area - many parishes received huge grant funding from Waste Recycling Environmental Ltd (WREN) as a consequence of having a land-fill site in their area. In starting this Hall and Sports Field Project your Council had every good reason to expect that we could make a strong case for grant funding from both BLF and WREN.You may recall our first public meeting where we showed the first design for the new hall. Our preliminary enquiries to those bodies had confirmed our expectations of successful funding applications.

Parish Councils are able to take out Public Works Loans (PWL) over a long period at extremely low interest rates. It was, and still is, the Council's intention to do this as part of the funding provision. However, because it is then a public debt, the plan was to search all possible alternative grant sources in order to make the PWL portion of funding as little as possible.

However, in December 2009 BLF announced they would no longer supporting new-build (capital) projects with immediate effect. So over one-third of our potential funding income disappeared in an instant.

In the same week WREN announced an identical decision but for a different reason, although we don't have the full details. were instructed by HM Revenue & Customs to cease giving out grants in the form that they had been doing.

In January 2010 BLF announced that they had had a rethink about grant funding capital projects and would after all fund new-build. But, they now wished to give money to a much wider range of  projects than before, which means much smaller amounts to any one project.

New Village Hall

Whilst considering our options in the new situation, Rushcliffe Borough Council Planning Department threw us a lifeline. They suggested that we look at the possibility of straw-build construction. Financially speaking, this is extremely attractive. Straw-buildings are far less costly than brick or concrete and are far more thermally efficient so heating is cheaper. There are disadvantages to consider too. The current state is that the Council is seriously looking at this option. To that end we are visiting sites elsewhere that have done this. The locations we are looking at are in North Kesteven, Lincolnshire, Peak College, Derbyshire and a presentation to the Council by Amazonails, a firm with experience in this field.

The Council has now employed Reg Pegg as project-manager. He has been working with Nottingham Trent University architectural students on straw-build option designs. Their final designs will be presented to the Council on Thursday 10th June.That will be followed by the presentation by Amazonails on 17th June by which time we will have visited North Kesteven on 28th May.

Sports Facilities

In addition to the new village hall Cllr. Dan Philpotts has done a  tremendous amount of work on funding and equipment options for the Sports Field. Meetings with Scouts and Brownies, pupils of Langar Primary School and Toot Hill Comprehensive have been  held to obtain their views. Comparative prices have been sought from play equipment suppliers. The Council hopes to begin work on the Sports provision even if the hall cannot be started yet.

Allotments

The original idea was to  have had allotments on the same field but there wasn't enough room to have reasonable-sized plots. To address that the Council is having discussions with Lafarge Cement to see if their field behind the Bowling Club could be made available. The bottom section of that field is waterlogged and would not be usable but our measurements suggest that making use of the top half only would still provide adequate space for good-sized plots.

Although progress has been slow, we have not lost our vision and we look forward to signs of development on the field.

Cllr. Alex. Cessford.