Letters

By in Letters

Open letter to Syston Town Council
Following a letter published in the April issue from a concerned resident who didn’t want their identity shown in the newspaper, many other residents have asked the same question when a lot of residents are struggling due to the cost of living crisis. 
We are publishing the following questions on behalf of those residents and ratepayers of Syston who want to ask the following questions of Syston Town Council, but feel that they won’t get a reply if they contact the council direct:

  1. Can Syston Town Council explain why their percentage increase in their portion of the Council tax is 9.7% over triple that of the other councils?
    1. How can Syston Town Council justify this level of increase at a time of hardship for many residents?
  2. What will Syston Town Council use this increase for? And how will it benefit the Town and its residents?
  3. In a recent copy of the council’s newsletter, Syston Topic, it showed how the precept of 2023/24 was used as a pie chart. It showed the personnel cost £433,000, which amounted to 64% of the precept. How and why has the Town Council spent so much of the precept on personnel?
    The residents believe they should know how the money they pay for the existence of the parish/town council is used as many feel that the town council don’t do enough for the town so they have asked us to publish this open letter and hope the Town Council will send us a reply.

Dear Editor,
De Ville Park is a beautiful local community space, well used by residents. Families with young children enjoy the play ground, and older children enjoy kicking a ball and throwing a frisbee around the open space. It is a place for families to enjoy picnics, friends to meet and people to walk their dogs. It is an important part of our community.
Sadly open spaces around Syston are beginning to disappear. Housing developments are springing up all around us and many of the open fields and spaces we could previously enjoy have been lost to housing. In this context De Ville park is an increasingly important amenity for the local community. Regular park users were dismayed, therefore, to hear of plans to create a training pitch for an adults’ football club on this beautiful park. We did not hear about these plans to radically change a community park through a public consultation or communication from our Councillors, but through word of mouth. There has been no consultation about this plan with local residents and no impact study or risk assessment has been made available.
De Ville park is not a suitable venue for a training pitch. There are no toilets or changing room facilities and no car park. Leicestershire County Council have recently placed restrictions on on-street parking in this area. The park is not a big enough space to accommodate a training pitch alongside the existing uses of the park, and regular park users are concerned about the impact on the park itself, particularly the impact from churning up the grass and making part of the park unusable as a result. What is more, there are other training facilities in Syston which the Council has previously invested in, such as the sports pavilion and football pitches at Memorial Park, and Central Park has nearby parking and toilet facilities at the Community Centre.
Sadly the Town Council has not asked local residents for their views on this proposed development. It is only to be hoped that they will listen to the views of existing users of De Ville Park and refuse to approve the plan.
A concerned resident