Blisworth Community Plan

 September - November 2009

The village is generally thought to display much apathy since past discussions upon community affairs have been difficult to get going.  Neighbouring villages have enjoyed varying success with a village plan, or a community plan, in response to urging from the local government.  They have pointed out that it will be worth doing because parish council and SNC are obliged to listen and expected to take action in the simpler of issues.

The village has been approaching The Plan this year (2009) in three stages, a village awareness day "Blisworth Past and Present" staged in the village hall on September 5th by the Heritage Society, a "Come and Have Your Say" Day also in the village hall on two days (October 10th and 11th) and, a few weeks later, there will be the circulation of a large questionnaire to all households from which some quantification could be obtained for the relative importance of issues.  An important aspect of the plan is that it sets the scene for community management for five years - leaving some of us hoping the parish council can adapt to the challenge.

The September meeting emphasised village history and the role of various societies and provided an early warning and justification for the October sessions.  It was reasonably well attended.

The October meeting was particularly well prepared in that all households were given a leaflet about the meeting a few days prior.  In the village hall the preparations involved the setting up of seven displays. These were on 1. housing development, 2. general amenities, 3. sport and leisure, 4. youth facilities, 5. canal partnership projects, 6. the environment including conservation and 7. traffic and transport issues.  The array in the hall was too difficult to photograph 'in one' - hence the suggestive composite which follows.

The displays were aimed to draw attention to specific issues and invite comment - most of the issues were in a context of 'let's improve the village'.  Comments from all quarters were collected as 'Post-It' notes which were either put on display or placed in an anonymous box.  Some displays were designed so that ticks may be placed into a choice of boxes.  In one way or another, views were sampled.  For every arrival at the hall, the location of their house was logged using red dots on a map of the parish.  This revealed total numbers of households represented and in which streets they were distributed and here are the results of that breakdown.
                                                         
It is clear that some parts of the village show a clear reluctance to take a look at the issues and perhaps we should look carefully at reasons why that is.  One is obvious; people who live a distance from the centre do not consider the village as part of their life and so their responses were near zero, but perhaps surprisingly the area that was once 100% council housing returned only 5% and Ladyfield returned zero.

Nevertheless, a participation rate of over 20% for half the streets is at least a mildly encouraging outcome and, if a similar response is obtained for the questionnaires, we will be able to assume the results were a useful indication of village opinion.  The neighbouring village of Roade received a return rate of over 40% for their questionnaires.

At the end of the two day session the comments were sorted so that issues could be graded in respect of their importance to villagers.  There were put up 100s of "Post-It" notes which go forward in an analysis that helped design questions to be included in the questionnaire which was distributed to 800 households early in 2010 (not all houses could be sampled).

By March 2010, the return of the questionnaire at Blisworth amounted to 75% - a truly amazing figure especially in view of the fact that SNC distributed in November 2009 an opinion questionnaire that overlapped the subject matter of ours!  Publication of the results and a village plan, based on the returns, is expected June/July 2010.