Your letters...

Provide proper data on station

Sir, — I have read and responded to the Oxfordshire Fire Service consultation and many of my observations are similar to those of Councillor Stefan Gawrysiak reported in the Henley Standard.

In particular, the consultation only mentions changes to average response times for the whole county and not the local effects of changes.

Residents need to know the effect of response times where they live, not the county average. We need the raw data for response times to each locality, before and after the changes.

Without the Henley station, we will be further from a fire station than anywhere else in the county. This is clear from the maps within the consultation document and it is astonishing that the authors have not noticed.

Of the three earmarked for closure, Henley has the highest call-out rate and is the greatest distance from any other station (including those in neighbouring counties not mentioned in the consultation).

Without relevant data it is impossible for residents in Henley, or anywhere else, to properly evaluate the fire service proposals.

The county-wide average statistics provided in the consultation are meaningless for people in real life.

Whether this is just woolly thinking or deliberate obfuscation is open to debate but Oxfordshire have a track record in this respect.

Some years ago, I became involved in the county council’s proposals to close village libraries and they likewise built what they called a “robust” case based on completely nonsense assumptions. — Yours faithfully,

David Watson

Laureate Gardens

Park home fire safety at risk

I thank Michael Hodges for his letter about the closure of Henley fire station (Standard, November 28). It was very informative.

By choice, I live in a park home along with 87 other owners, all are of wooden construction. A 10-minute response time in the event of fire is ideal and is a promise from our Henley fire station.

The suggestion of closure and, I quote from the Oxfordshire County Council proposals — “Removing it would increase the average first fire engine response time by two seconds across Oxfordshire”. That is 10 minutes plus two seconds from Wallingford?

Google maps directions says it’s 22 minutes to Henley from Wallingford fire station, which I think would be the nearest manned station after the closures.

The majority of park homes have four 47kg gas bottles, others have oil tanks for heating and cooking. How quickly does it take a park home to catch fire? Answer — too quickly!

A delay in reaching the fire would be too late — we would be ashes. Please save Henley fire station. — Yours faithfully,

Don Hilton

Swiss Farm Park, Henley

Questions to put to council

Sir, — May I thank the Henley Standard for your Save Our Station campaign and the coverage over the last few weeks.

Henley fire station is under existential threat. On page 51 of the consultation it says that Woodstock, Eynsham and Henley fire station are being readied for closure. We must fight a good campaign to stop the station closure.

The county council consultation closes on January 20 so please have your say and also sign the petition. What is worrying is that the consultation started on October 28 and questions which should have been in the consultation are not being answered.

Q1: If there is a house fire or a car crash in Henley our crew attends in 10 minutes. If it closes, how long from Caversham and Wallingford will it take to attend?

Q2: The Henley fire area is from Nuffield to Hurley and Medmenham to Caversham. This is the busiest area in South Oxfordshire. How many calls in a year does that represent?

Q3: Because it is the busiest and the rural distances are long it needs a fire station. True or false?

Q4: Why was Henley stopped from recruiting volunteer firefighters?

Q5: Why was the consultation started without the delay time data for Henley?

These questions should be answered.

It is also my assertion that If the Henley fire station closes then lives will be put at risk because a response time of
10 minutes from Henley will be changed for a dangerous response delay of 21 minutes from Caversham and
31 minutes from Wallingford. — Yours faithfully,

Councillor Stefan Gawrysiak

Oxfordshire County Council, Henley

Shell out for charging points

Sir, — Tracey Lynch makes a good point about safety at EV charging points generally (Standard, November 28) but she and other EV owners will, I hope, be pleased to know that she is not correct in stating that the charging point in the Mill Meadows car park is the only 50kW or higher charging point in Henley.

Although they were installed without much fanfare, there are in fact two 60kW chargers in the King’s Road (Waitrose) car park — the large box near the toilets at the north end of the line of ordinary charging points — and another two 60kW charging points in the Greys Road car park — a similar large box at the southern end of the line.

Both facilities are in well-lit areas and, the last time I tried them, they both worked! A small miracle but a miracle nonetheless. It has been interesting to observe the increase in usage of the charging points in the King’s Road and the Greys Road car parks since they were first installed.

What I do not understand is why the owners of the Shell petrol station in Reading Road do not install a few rapid chargers there. They must be facing a reduction in the sale of petrol and diesel given the obvious increase in the ownership of EVs in the Henley area.

There is surely money to be made in selling electricity instead. Shell already has a network of EV charging points, so why not install a few on their site in Henley? It’s in the middle of an area where many of the nearby houses do not have driveways and charging at home is out of the question. It seems obvious really — come on Shell, time to step up! — Yours faithfully,

Nick Blandy

Quarry Lane, Shiplake

Circular way of community

Editor, — I too was “disappointed” to read of the Government’s decision to scrap the role of our Thames Valley Police and Crime Commissioner Matthew Barber along with others (Standard, November 21).

This is primarily because the commissioners are elected to improve police accountability.

However, I had the privilege of attending Mr Barber’s community fund event recently at Reading town hall. Every year Mathew gives away grants totalling up to £400,000, a pot of money accumulated from the proceeds of crime recovered by the police. He opened the event remarking that, although it was cold outside, he hoped we would hear some heartwarming stories in the following hours.

In total 49 community organisations had been successful in obtaining grant funding to help their work, all of which was focused around helping the victims of crime, preventing crime and rehabilitating the perpetrators of crime.

The organisations came from across Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire, including charities, small local councils and community associations that reached out to all members of our society.

We then heard from three of the last funding round successful applicants and their stories of how the funding had helped make a significant difference to what they could achieve.

In his closing remarks Thames Valley Police Chief Constable Jason Hogg expressed his view that this was proof that Britain wasn’t broken and we should be proud of the ordinary members of our society who give their time and expertise to make a difference.

While Mr Barber will no doubt continue this work for the next two years, I wonder what will happen when his role disappears? — Yours faithfully,

Pauline Vahey

Rupert Lane, Henley

Warden would sort parking

Sir, — What is the point of local authorities if they will not do the obvious, simple things to improve the lives of those that elect and pay for them?

As reported in the Henley Standard, I asked the parish council in Sonning Common — hard-working volunteers — if there was anything they could do to get the parking restrictions in the village centre enforced? The answer, boiled down to its essentials, was “No”.

Illegal parking is rampant in the village, principally outside and across the road from the Co-op. There are designated parking spaces on the road and yellow lines but these are routinely ignored.

There is a free car park behind the Co-op and there is almost invariably space in it. But some people are too idle to use it and they know they will get away with it.

Everyone knows that the way to persuade people to observe parking restrictions is for a parking warden to issue tickets imposing a fine. It is simple. If a warden came irregularly a couple of times a week, for a restricted period, and doled out fines, motorists would get the message.

Some time ago South Oxfordshire District Council had the bright idea of taking the power of parking enforcement away from the police — who have better things to do — and delegating it to parish councils. But this never happened.

Instead, the power was assumed by Oxfordshire County Council, the very embodiment of useless inertia. The county council “outsourced” the job to a contractor.

Unsurprisingly, Sonning Common has never seen a parking warden, or “enforcement officer”, since.

Sonning Common’s parish clerk was told by the county council that he could report illegally parked cars online. What a fatuous response!

Meanwhile, the yellow lines — which were repainted and extended less than a year ago — are fading away because of the number of vehicles parking on them. — Yours faithfully,

Tom Fort

Sonning Common

Streamline river caretaker

Editor, — At the Greener Henley event (Tackling Flooding and Pollution in Henley) held at the Kenton Theatre on Wednesday last week, the excellent panel agreed that as well as community action there was the need for a single body with the responsibility for the management of the whole river basin of the River Thames.

This should include land drainage, navigation, water resources and reservoirs, treatment of clean and dirty water, and building on the flood plain. Indeed, having responsibility for the entire water cycle. Any community action would then have one complete body with whom to take their concerns. — Yours faithfully,

Douglas Wright

Caversham

Money where mouth is...

Editor, — Yet again your correspondent Edward Sierpowski does the case he presents no favours by his intemperate language. This time it is the beleaguered BBC in his sights. Could it possibly be because the BBC’s reporting does not reflect back to him information that accords with his opinions?

It certainly seems a stretch to suggest that there is some sort of correlation between the BBC’s postage bill and the veracity of their reporting. By all means cast around for alternative information sources to check that the BBC’s broadcasts are credible.

Certainly criticise them for their leaden-footed reaction to misbehaviour of a small number of their staff. But to claim that to pay the licence fee is to pay to be lied to is ridiculous.

Presumably Mr Sierpowski’s latest diatribe was prompted by the clumsy splicing together of two clips from Trump’s infamous speech in January 2020.

But is Mr Sierpowski seriously suggesting that, misguided as the editing was, it created a false impression of Trump’s behaviour that day? What was the phrase “we fight, we fight like hell”, addressed to an angry crowd that included members of militia groups supposed to mean?

Mr Sierpowski should be invited to put his money where his mouth is and name the broadcasters whom he considers to be professional liars.

Perhaps he has Frank Gardner, Lyse Doucet, David Attenborough, Jeremy Bowen, Lucy Williamson, Barbara Plett Usher, Gary O’Donoghue, Sarah Smith or Chris Mason in mind? Name the culprits if you dare, Mr Sierpowski. — Yours faithfully,

Andy Robertson

Woodcote

Future looks not so bright

Sir, — Society has become a death cult, so oblivious of the cliff edge it is rushing towards that even turkeys voting for Christmas are looking on in surprise.

For 50 years I’ve been hearing the claims — mechanisation, automation, computerisation and recently AI being the saviours of humanity from the drudgery of the workplace, mundane repetitive tasks and allowing the creation of a new utopia for mankind. And we have been falling for it.

Only the elite propagators of this ideology have got rich and retired early with smug smiles on their faces, while we have been happily pushing the self-destruct button on our lives.

Jobs were eliminated at each phase without any easements to lifestyles or finances. At no time did the retirement age go down or wages or pensions rise to a comfortable level.

Now that the working class sector is decimated, they are putting AI into the decision-making managerial strata.

The pace is accelerating and the only joy to be had is that very soon AI will decide it’s time to eliminate the posts of ruling class and politicos. Unfortunately, only moments before it decides to eliminate humanity outright as being irrelevant. — Yours faithfully,

Edward Sierpowski

Henley

Origin stories through time

Sir, — I was very pleased to see the redoubtable Douglas Kedge criticising Richard Govett’s strange suggestion that I have become a mere swine (Standard, November 21).

Having known Richard for some years I cannot believe that it was a personal slur on me but merely the opinion of one trapped by belief in the various versions of the Bible.

As we all know, the Christian Bible appeared many years after the Jewish Torah and well before the publication of the Koran. However, all three publications are “Johnny come latelies” in the belief stakes. It is quite logical and very obvious that early in the development of human speech every tribe sat around its fire looking up at the sky and somebody asked questions such as: “Where do we come from?”

Whoever came up with plausible answers became respected — a bit like the conch holder in Lord of the Flies — and probably became the tribe’s High Priest! From this start whole creation myths were spawned and then spread around becoming every tribe’s central belief system and giving them grounds for war and conquest etc.

Supporting this, recent DNA analysis shows that the Aboriginal Australians are the world’s oldest society, first appearing some 58,000 years ago while most of the world was devoid of Homo sapiens and organised religions. Their stories of the Dreamtime are fascinating, coherent and devoid of any mention of a single God.

Moving well forward in time we come to the civilisations that flourished in the “Fertile Crescent” of the Middle East where the Babylonians and the Assyrians had well developed theologies based on their creator gods such as Marduk.

Indeed, all the events and rules set out in the Torah/Bible/Koran were written down a couple of thousand years BC so, as the saying goes, “There is nothing new under the sun”.

Those who have been indoctrinated in the monotheistic faiths, as Richard clearly has, would do well to read the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Babylonian Epic of Creation to realise that God is no more than a figment of a lot of imaginations but now supported by immensely wealthy religious organisations and their vested interests supporting its continuation. — Yours faithfully,

Philip M M Collings

Peppard Common

Belief or not, care for others

I have read with interest the correspondence between Messrs Govett, Collings and Kedge regarding the existence or non-existence of “God” or some higher power.

The argument is necessarily futile as both answers offer further unsurmountable questions (Did God say “let there be a big bang” for example?) and there is no proof or possibility of a proof in this world (and only in one case, the next).

The Bible does not prove the existence any more than modern astrophysics disproves it. (I, as it happens, have one granddaughter a vicar and one an astrophysicist and they get on fine).

It is a matter of personal belief or, if you will, faith, (believing what you know to be untrue). I should here admit to being among the Fors (my wife, the Againsts).

Many are the people who will declare that in times of extreme stress they have prayed and felt some sort of response, even myself, but I would not dream of being arrogant enough to claim this as proof.

If there is such a God, he (Oh I have written “he” again when I tried to avoid it) must also of necessity be beyond any human concept, not an old man with a beard, a hyper-hyper computer or a committee.

This last has its attractions as if we compare the old joke about the racehorse and the camel with the state of the world but we are getting into the realms of farce and I’d better stop. — Yours faithfully,

Peter Dayton

Kennylands Road, Sonning Common