April 2015. PARISH DEVOLUTION Dear Parishioners, We are pleased to be able to inform you that your Parish Council has adopted the Bucks County Council (BCC) offer of devolved services to our parish. As part of a nationwide effort, county councils have been involved in devolving certain services to improve the way these services are delivered. Having aving local parish and town councils take control is central to this. The current tranchee of services that are to be devolved include urban grass cutting, footpath siding out, maintenance of public rights of way, sign post cleaning and hedge cutting cutting as well as some other minor maintenance tasks. We won’t pretend this is not a money saving exercise. County and District Councils ouncils are under extreme pressure sure to reduce costs as funding from central government is significantly reduced. The effect of this would have been a reduction in the quality of services. BCC have identified that by giving the decision de making process to parish councils,, the right choices about where money is spent can be made, which will in turn eliminate waste and improve the quality of the services delivered. delivered Mentmore entmore Parish Council is being given the funding that would have gone to the BCC contractor and we are able to choose how we spend this money to carry out these tasks. Your Parish Council expects to be able to not only deliver the same service that was provided by BCC, BCC but to improve on it. While we will be doing our best to get this right first time we are realistic in our expectations. expectations BCC has often been criticised for not doing what they should be doing. We have some catching up to do and we fully ly expect there will be issues with how we deal with the new demands. We hope the parishioners of Mentmore, Crafton and Ledburn will take ownership of this and get involved. We will w be relying on your input, feedback and help on how we manage this change. We want to make it clear that this scheme is limited in scope. For example, example we will only be responsible for verge cutting in the 30mph zones; BCC will still be responsible for the other areas. We are not taking on many major issues such as pot holes, speeding speeding or the road structure itself but this is a first welcome step in us being able to take more control of our own parish. If you have any questions,, comments or suggestions we would love to hear from you, you either by attending one of the parish council meetings, writing to us at [email protected] or chatting to one of the parish councillors. Yours faithfully,

Mentmore Parish Council. www.mentmore.org