Agenda item

·         Regional LAF Chairs Meeting

·         Regional LAF Officers update

·         SE LAF Annual Conference

·         LAF Annual Conference

Berkshire LAF Chairs’ Meeting

Peter Radband had attended this meeting on behalf of the Forum. Peter raised concern at there being no national LAF Forum and the Regional LAF was not as active at present. The M4 Smart Motorway development was one of the matters discussed at this meeting; the work to improve the motorway wouldn’t directly impact upon the borough.

Regional LAF Officers’ Update

Graham and Rose had not been able to attend the last Regional LAF Officers’ Update, but had provided an update to Jonathan Clark.

Feedback provided included a comment on annual reporting. As it currently stand, 2 annual reports need to be completed for the forum each year; one of these was the ‘dry’ spreadsheet form that needs submitting to Natural England (runs by financial year); the other is the more ‘glossy’ version (runs by calendar year), which is uploaded to BFCs website. Feedback from Natural England (NE) had indicated that a spreadsheet format helped with benchmarking data across authorities, but Graham and Rose had asked if annual reports could be combined into one?

For the round table discussion BFC provided examples of current issues, successful projects and best practice examples. Best practice examples: gate replacement project to improve accessibility on rights of way (working with South East Berkshire Ramblers and funding provided by RA); and using volunteers to help monitor the condition of PROW. A good example of cross boundary cooperation included working with RBWM to establish a TRO enforceable width restriction of 1.6 metres in a central section of Hawthorne Lane and the whole of Berry Lane, both byways in Warfield. This would help to protect the surface of this rural Byway and would also hopefully help address the issue of fly-tipping. Issues faced included fly-tipping becoming increasingly problematic due to the time and expense involved to deal with it and it tended to be on rural byways.

South East LAF Annual Conference

Hugh Fitzwilliams, Colin Bird and Graham Pockett attended the South East LAF Annual Conference in London in May. Members thanked Hugh for his feedback from the event, which was attached to the agenda papers. Hugh reported that the event was well organised and well run. Colin commented that the difference between LAFs and how they operated was very noticeable. The Chairman suggested that it might be a useful exercise for Forum members to attend as observers to neighbouring LAF meetings such as the Mid and West Berkshire LAF. Their group was much bigger than LCAFs seeing as their remit covered a  much larger geographical area.

LAF National Conference

The Chairman and Rose had submitted responses to Natural England’s survey regarding the LAF National Conference and had suggested Bristol as their preferred location. The Parks and Countryside Service would be able to pay certain travel costs and a small amount for food associated with attending the event. Rose had suggested that the Chairman of the National Rural Crime Network would be a good speaker at the event in relation to organisations set up to raise awareness on rural crime and how LAFs were dealing with related issues. The Chairman’s suggestions for topics were access to military land and a talk by Natural England.