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Continued from p.25<br />
<strong>Village</strong> <strong>Voice</strong> <strong>Oct</strong>ober/<strong>Nov</strong>ember <strong>2019</strong><br />
COMMUNITY<br />
BOARDS<br />
The proposals for new Buckinghamshire<br />
Community Boards - as seen from the<br />
community of Penn & Tylers Green...<br />
businesses and settled to a new life in Penn and<br />
Tylers Green where she was to become a pivotal<br />
member of the community over the next 60<br />
years. She continued her work helping<br />
recovering alcoholics, touring the country to<br />
attend Al-Anon meetings and travelling to New<br />
York to be Al-Anon’s UK representative at an<br />
international gathering. A keen writer she was<br />
the village correspondent for the<br />
Buckinghamshire Advertiser for over 20 years,<br />
and wrote poems and articles for writing groups<br />
and specialist magazines, including, of course,<br />
<strong>Village</strong> <strong>Voice</strong>.<br />
She worked for many years as a secretary at<br />
Agropharm in St John’s Road; was a stalwart of<br />
the local church and volunteer secretary for the<br />
Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme.<br />
Importantly however, she was a wonderful<br />
friend and neighbour to so many people in the<br />
village: a discreet and empathetic listener with<br />
an ever open door and a warm and smiling<br />
welcome. Her faith in people was boundless - in<br />
her eighties she featured in a BBC TV<br />
documentary where she played host to a<br />
troubled young lad, convinced she could help<br />
him with some common sense, some straight<br />
talking and some TLC.<br />
Little wonder then that hundreds of people<br />
attended her funeral and thanksgiving service in<br />
the middle of the holiday period at Penn Church<br />
in August. A <strong>Village</strong> <strong>Voice</strong> interview with her a<br />
few years ago concluded: “Pat liked people and<br />
people like her. It is people like Pat that make<br />
communities like ours richer.” How we will<br />
miss her. Peter Brown<br />
www.pennandtylersgreen.org.uk<br />
The new Buckinghamshire Council takes<br />
over from the former County Council and<br />
four District Councils on 1 April next year.<br />
This new Council will be mainly based in<br />
Aylesbury but is anxious to involve local<br />
groups, which are to be called Community<br />
Boards, in order to encourage a strong sense<br />
of involvement and communication with the<br />
far-flung parishes around the county.<br />
The parish boundaries will not be changed<br />
initially, but all the present County and<br />
District Councillors are to be replaced by<br />
fewer (147) Unitary Councillors. The<br />
electoral boundaries will be revised in due<br />
course by the Boundary Commission. No<br />
decisions have yet been made on how the<br />
existing Planning roles of the District<br />
Councils will be dealt with.<br />
There has been a consultation by the<br />
Shadow Authority on this important matter,<br />
seeking views on how they should carve up<br />
the county - on the optimum number of<br />
Boards, their membership, budget, voting<br />
rights and agendas. The pros and cons of 11,<br />
12, 14 and 19 Boards were considered and<br />
their recommendation is for the 14 Boards as<br />
shown on the map. Membership of each<br />
Board would consist of the local Unitary<br />
Councillors, Parish Councillors, resident<br />
representatives, as well as the police, fire<br />
services, health professionals and so on.<br />
Each Board would have a full-time officer<br />
and a budget and would meet up to six times<br />
a year. The total county budget for these<br />
Boards has already been set at £2.5 m for the<br />
Continued overleaf<br />
27
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