The Parish Council meets at 7.30pm on Thursday, 20 March in the Church Room at Potten End. The agenda can be downloaded and contains links to all the supporting papers.

HertsLynx

The meeting will start with a presentation from Alice Missler of Hertfordshire County Council who will provide an update on the HertsLynx service. If you have any questions or observations on the service – this is your opportunity to raise them!.

Local Government re-organisation

As I reported last month, the Government has announced plans to re-organise local government and has asked Hertfordshire County Council and its districts, including Dacorum, to submit interim plans by 21 March 2025 with full proposals to follow by 28 November. The Government has made it very clear that it expects the plans to be for one or more new unitary councils in Hertfordshire, 

The Council has received a letter from the Chief Executive of Dacorum asking for its views and will discuss at the meeting whether it should respond given that the preliminary response to the Government is due this Friday, and if so how.

Highways

There are even more road closures in and around the parish over the next three months for a variety of reasons. 

• Frithsden Land  is closed for work to the road surface from 17 – 22 March
• Roman Rd is closed for drainage investigation from 17 – 22 March
• Leighton Buzzard Rd will be closed overnight between 2 and 4 April for resurfacing. 
• Hempstead Lane will have traffic restrictions at various times in March, April and May for Highways and Affinity Water
• Water End Rd will also have various closures in May and June for Open Reach and Highways

For more up to date information on roadworks please refer to Causeway one network

Planning

The Council will consider the following applications at its meeting (reference numbers relate to the Dacorum Planning Portal):

• 15 The Back, Potten End – first floor rear extension (25/00570/FHA)

The footpath connecting Frithsden Copse to the Hertfordshire Way near to Horseshoe Pond (FP17) has just been resurfaced by Dacorum Borough Council.  Note that footpaths in the parish are maintained by Dacorum through its Rights of Way Officer.  The parish council keeps a watching brief on them and reports problems so that they can be addressed as soon as possible.  Whilst Dacorum looks after the surface of paths it is the responsibility of adjoining landowners to ensure that there are no vegetation, or any other, encroachments.

Our new solar-powered Speed Indicator Device (SID) has just been installed on Hempstead Lane.  A mount has also been installed on Water Lane Road and the SID will be moved between the two locations from time to time.  The parish council is grateful to David Lloyd (our Hertfordshire County Councillor) and Terry Douris (our Dacorum Borough Councillor) for their support of its efforts to reduce the speed of vehicles passing through our parish.

The Parish Council is pleased to announce the recent co-option of two new Councillors.  Cllr Simon Nelson was co-opted in September and Cllr Geoff Brown was co-opted in October.  Their details will appear on this website in due course.

Each year the Parish Council’s Annual Governance and Accountability Return (AGAR) needs to be reviewed by an external auditor. The unaudited AGAR has been published with this notice – please note that until the external audit has been completed it is subject to change.

From Monday 22nd June to Friday 31st July 2020 inclusive, any person interested has the right to inspect and make copies of the accounting records for the financial year to which the audit relates and all books, deeds, contracts, bills, vouchers, receipts and other documents relating to those records. Details of how to obtain access to this information is provided in the Notice of Public Rights document below.

Notice of Public Rights and Publication of Unaudited Annual Governance and Accountability return and explanatory notes.

Annual Internal Audit Report 2019/20

Annual Governance Statement 2019/20

Annual Accounting Statement 2019/20

Council Management Accounts 2019/20 (published here for information – not part of the formal AGAR process)