State of the Tarvin Village Report.

The Parish Council has a small working party that regularly looks at the village to ensure that there are no major problems and that the CW&C organisation responsible for cleaning is doing its job to the correct standard. A recent walkabout reported that, despite some random rubbish along the main road, the village was looking good. The grass verges had recently been cut which always makes the village look tidier.

A number of individual problems had been reported directly to CW&C using the SMYLE app. This ingenious piece of technology allows anyone to take a picture of a problem on a phone and send it direct to the Council together with a precise geographical local. While all the dozen reports flashed through by the working party electronically have been acknowledged, only 6 have been passed on the relevant department. It will be interesting to see if the faults are put right with the same efficiency that they can now be reported.

At the Parish Council meeting there were two problems raised that were not picked up by the working party. The state of the walkways from Gowy Crescent, both to Heath Drive and Sheaf Close, are heavily overgrown with vegetation from adjoining gardens making them difficult to walk through. Brambles are at face height and street lighting has become obscured. The Council agreed to look at this more closely and to write, where appropriate, to the owners of the overgrown hedges asking them to do some timely pruning. Once again the Parish Council urges everybody to take a long, hard look at their hedges and to keep them in order. If two people can't walk side by side down a regular pavement then it is time to get cutting. Privacy is important but so is being a good neighbour.

The same goes to the parking of cars on grass verges, another issue that gets regularly aired in Parish Council meetings. If you have too many cars to park in your drive then please use the ROAD and not the grass verges for the overspill. While parked cars do impede traffic and slow cars down, this is not necessarily a bad thing in residential areas. The addition of a couple of seconds on a journey is surely worth it to keep verges looking green and healthy. In addition, if cars are parked on the grass then the grass can't be cut – the impetus for a particular complaint at the recent meeting.