28 Sept – Reading Town Meal

Lunch is ready

Come and join us at the Reading Town Meal on Saturday 29th September. We are going to use this as an opportunity to launch our new website and the revised Reading Climate Change strategy.

Please do come and find us on one of the stalls. You can find out more about our aims for the next couple of years, and find out how you can get involved.

and there’s still time to sign up and help with this year’s meal. Can you provide some excess vegetables from your garden? help to collect equipment and supplies? help on the day? see the main town meal website  for more options and to sign up

Tawny Owl Surveying: help needed

The British Trust for Ornithology is commencing two tawny owl surveys this summer to assess distribution.

The first, the tawny owl point survey,  starts in August and asks people to adopt one of many 2 km squares selected across the country, stand in the centre on two nice evenings roughly one month apart, and estimate owl territories. Reading is not on the survey, but there are many squares to survey around Wokingham (and nice pubs for afterwards)

The second one, the tawny owl calling survey, starts at the end of September and simply asks you to listen out in your own garden for tawny owls.

You really don’t need any previous knowledge to do either of these surveys as the instructions on the BTO website are very very clear. Please have a go.

Government Consultation on Household waste duty of care: updating the guidance

The Duty of Care is the requirement for the producers of waste to take adequate care about disposal, such as not choosing a cheap contractor who will dump it in the countryside, or describing the waste wrongly.

This consultation is seeking views on the updated guidance for householders and new guidance for local authorities on meeting and enforcing the duty of care for waste

Closes 28th August 2018

https://www.gov.uk/government

Government Consultation on The future for small-scale low-carbon generation

This seeks to identify the challenges and opportunities from small-scale low carbon electricity generation in contributing to government’s objectives for clean, affordable, secure and flexible power. It also seeks information on the role for government and the private sector in overcoming these challenges and realising these opportunities.

This call for evidence is aimed at individuals and groups with any interest in the small scale low carbon industry. In particular the government is seeking views from affected individuals, energy suppliers, and industry, including manufacturers suppliers and installers.

Consultation closes 30th August

https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/the-future-for-small-scale-low-carbon-generation-a-call-for-evidence

Reading & Caversham flood scheme consultation

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Map showing Proposed flood alleviation scheme for Reading and Caversham (option 3)

 

The Environment Agency has just finished a consultation on a proposed flood alleviation scheme for Reading and Caversham. This finished on the 26th July but you can view the plans here:

 

The website describes what happens next:

The Environment Agency will consider all of the following information and use it together to make a decision on which, if any of the options we will take forward.

  • Landowners wishes, as shared through results of this consultation, feedback from individual meetings and feedback from the landowner drop-in held on the 26 June 2018.
  • Public views, as shown by the results of this consultation and feedback gathered at our public drop-ins.
  • Planning application requirements and recommendations.
  • Technical restrictions. When we develop the detail of the design we may discover physical restrictions that have not shown up during our initial investigations, these could include space available for construction, size of foundations required, archaeological findings, endangered species, to name a few. Any such findings could mean that we have to change the detail of the option or even consider a different, previously discounted option.
  • Cost of the proposal and funding available. The project would be partly funded by central government, but there is still a need to find more funding, for example from organisations and businesses that will benefit.
  • The time it will take to design, build and construct
  • Maintenance. We would need to agree who would be responsible for maintaining any new structures before putting a new structure in place.
  • Wildlife and landscape. If we develop an option then wildlife and landscape will be taken into consideration, and where possible we will look to improve landscape and habitat. We will always mitigate for any habitat and species that has been unavoidably impacted as a result of work we do to reduce flooding.

 

There is an opportunity here to take advantage of some of the £2.8 billion that the government has made available for flood alleviation, between now and 2021. All schemes will need to be partnership funded though so we will need to raise money to make this happen.

Hopefully, we can get the consultants to model the impacts of climate change on future River Thames floods. We do expect floods to be bigger and more frequent in the future so it is important that we prepare. It is not just people’s houses and businesses that will be affected in a big flood: notice that both Caversham and Reading bridges could be affected, which would have knock-on affects for many people trying to live and work in the town.

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