Bollards replaced in Holmesdale Road

The bollards in Holmesdale Road near Giffords Cottages which I funded from my Member Grant in 2016 were knocked down by a car at the end of October. Tomorrow (Saturday 30 January) will see a road closure between the junctions with Devon Road and East Hill to enable Kent Highways to replace the bollards. The closure is scheduled for between 8 am and 2 pm.

Renewing the footpath from Copse Bank

Tomorrow sees the start of the closure of Public Right of Way SU4/ SR165 in Seal, running from just off Childsbridge Lane (the closure starts by Ragstones) to the A25 opposite Trinity School and the Weald of Kent annex. This is for very welcome works to improve the footpath.

The improvement was agreed as a planning condition (condition 14) of the approval of the expansion of Trinity School. The Parish Council advocated strongly for this as a means of encouraging local students to take a safe route to walk or cycle to the schools on the former Wildernesse site, and I took this up at the time with KCC officers. It was proposed as part of the application in early 2019 that a £10,000 contribution be made for the improvement of SR165 - see paragraphs 46 and 52 of the report to the KCC Planning Applications Committee in January 2019). The steady addition of years of entry for Weald of Kent, and the subsequent confirmation of the establishment of an annex for Tunbridge Wells Grammar School for Boys, have added to the case for it.

Delivery of this has taken some time - a key Memorandum of Understanding relating to this project is dated December 2018 - and I have, on behalf of the Parish Council, taken this up a number of times. It is now set to take place. The footpath is closed from tomorrow for up to 21 days.

More testing sites, including Sevenoaks Community Centre

Following last week’s announcement, KCC today announced the opening of five additional symptom-free (asymptomatic) testing centres in the course of this week. This will bring the total across the county to 19, including two in Sevenoaks District. The second of these, opening on Friday, is in the Sevenoaks Community Centre in Cramptons Road, Bat and Ball. This should be very accessible for residents of Sevenoaks North and Darent Valley, especially in areas such as Otford.

The asymptomatic testing programme in Kent has now carried out over 50,000 tests, and this figure should now rise rapidly. The current 14 sites can carry out 14,000 tests per day, and this should rise to 19,000 by the end of the week.

You can find KCC’s media release about the new openings here.

2021 begins: Schools, testing sites and lockdown again

Happy 2021.

It’s over a fortnight - embracing Christmas and the New Year - since I last posted. There’s been a lot since then that I’ve just not had time to write up; on Sunday, 20 December, the French authorities blocked any HGVs and other vehicles crossing the Channel. This lasted for 48 hours, at the end of which vehicles were only able to make the journey if they had secured a negative Covid test. The resulting challenges of traffic management, driver welfare and impact on local communities (especially Dover) were intense and only started to ease around Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I’ll be writing more about transition, so may revert in more detail to those extraordinary days at that point.

The NewYear started with further controversy over whether primary schools should open to the majority of children, or should delay their start for a fortnight. The Department for Education ruled that eight of Kent’s twelve Districts should be considered under the ‘contingency framework’, meaning that general primary opening would be delayed for a fortnight, but that four Districts - Canterbury, Thanet, Dover and Folkestone and Hythe - should not. Neither I nor our public health team could see the rationale for this, and so Richard Long (Cabinet Member for Education and Skills) and I wrote to the Education Secretary, urging that the contingency framework should also be applied to these four Districts. This generated a lot of media interest (including Radio 4’s World at One - interview starts 28 minutes and 30 seconds in) but within a few hours was overtaken entirely by events.

As of last night, Kent - with the rest of the country - found itself in a third national lockdown. The acceleration of infections that we saw in Kent in November and early December, strongly linked to the new strand of the virus, has taken hold nationally. Much of our response reflects the approaches developed in the first and second lockdowns, and I will be returning to this in future posts. You can find our on the day response here.

The Prime Minister’s announcement came at the end of a day in which we had announced the establishment of twelve new asymptomatic testing centres, adding to the two (in Swale and Thanet) that we opened a week before Christmas. This gives testing centres in all of the twelve Districts, and more will be added in the coming weeks, resulting in two in each District. In Sevenoaks, the first centre will be in the Swanley youth club in St Mary’s road, and a further site in the District will be announced shortly. In these new circumstances, we continue to press forward our approach of contact tracing, testing, communication and enforcement, while supporting the NHS in its roll out of vaccination.