The Parish Council welcomes careful residents...

Welcome to the first blog entry on our village website - under new management, at least for a while.

For those of you who don't know me, I'm the Chair of the Parish Council, and have been since May 2018. Many of you will have seen me walking around the village, doing my daily 10,000 steps come rain or shine. And, as we have a few new residents, I thought that I should start by explaining a little about what the Parish Council does.

A Parish Council is the first tier of local government - above us are Mid Suffolk District Council and, above them, Suffolk County Council. We provide a few strictly local services - street lights, dog waste bins, the playground, the defibrillator - and we respond, on behalf of the village, to planning applications.

There are five Parish Councillors, and we come up for election every four years on the same day as the District Council elections, so that means that the Council is up for election in May 2023. We are, I'm pleased to say, volunteers, so we don't cost you anything. We do, however, employ a professional Clerk on a part-time basis to ensure that we fulfil our legal obligations and to manage the day to day affairs of the Council.

We meet every two months, unless something urgent crops up, and details of our meetings can be found elsewhere on the website. Observers are welcome, and we offer residents an opportunity to raise any issues of concern at each meeting. We're also fairly approachable so, if you see one of us and you have a question, please stop us and ask. We may not have an answer, but we may well know someone who does!

Mark Valladares