Council and Committee at Odds Over Census

Tuesday’s Council meeting ran to nearly two hours as the parish considered the Drainage Committee’s revised population figure. The Committee is now claiming a count of seven hundred and forty-three, inclusive of Willow Bend; the Council’s 2024 figure of seven hundred and twelve remains on the parish precept.

The meeting was opened at nineteen minutes past seven by the Mayor, Margaret Drury, who noted that the gallery was unusually full and that the bell of St. Within’s had rung at half past six, which she took to be a coincidence.

Item four on the agenda was the population. The Parish Clerk, Verity Plowman, distributed a single sheet of paper bearing the words “under discussion” and sat down. The Mayor thanked her. Della Finch, Chair of the Drainage Committee, was then invited to speak.

Seven hundred and forty-three

Ms Finch began by reminding the Council that the Committee is responsible for the drainage rate, which is calculated per connected property. A higher count, she said, did not necessarily mean a higher rate, but a fairer distribution of the cost of keeping the sluice and the pumping station in good order.

She produced a sheet of her own, headed Reconciliation of Counts, 2024-2025. The Committee’s count, she said, included the year-round occupants of Willow Bend Caravan Park, plot by plot, and a careful estimate of part-year occupants based on the park’s own bookings. It also included, for the first time, the inhabitants of the Old Vicarage, which had previously been counted as a single dwelling but is now three flats.

The figure of seven hundred and forty-three, Ms Finch said, was provisional. It might rise.

Seven hundred and twelve

The Mayor thanked Ms Finch. She then invited the Council to consider its own 2024 figure of seven hundred and twelve, which was the figure sent to Aingersby Borough Council for the parish precept. That figure, she said, had been arrived at by the conventional method: door-to-door, on a single day in June, by a team of four.

She noted, carefully, that the two figures were not in conflict, only in disagreement. The Council counted residents. The Committee counted “people we are answerable for”. The Committee’s figure included seasonal occupants. The Council’s figure did not.

“Both figures,” she said, “are correct as far as they go.”

A letter from Waraich & Sons

At this point, Mr Hardeep Singh Waraich, of Waraich & Sons corner shop on Old Car Road, raised his hand from the public gallery and asked to be heard. The Mayor permitted it.

Mr Waraich observed that any count, properly taken, ought to include anyone who buys a paper from his shop. He counts three hundred and twelve.

There was laughter. The Mayor thanked him. Mr Waraich said he had written a letter, which the Gazette has printed elsewhere in this issue.

Under discussion

The Council voted, by six to three, to defer the matter to its October meeting, and to ask the Parish Clerk to prepare a reconciliation paper in the meantime. The Parish Clerk nodded, slowly, and wrote nothing down.

The Drainage Committee, for its part, has not yet commented. The Gazette has asked.

A letter from Mr Waraich on the same subject appears in this issue. A separate article by Della Finch on the Seventh Drain appears in our archive of careful reporting on the subject.