You Asked, We Listened – Parish Council Survey 2024/2025

We asked you about how satisfied you are living in Stinchcombe and 91% of respondents answered 6 or more on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being highly satisfied.

When we asked why people liked living here, you gave us a range of reasons, but the four most stated reasons were:

• Availability of local walks
• Security and safety of the area
• Beautiful views and countryside
• Caring villagers & community

The four most stated reasons for why you least like living here were:

• Lack of infrastructure & amenities
• Speed of traffic
• Repeated road works
• Litter

We asked you what you would like your Parish Council to try and do more of. You told us you wanted us to focus on:

• Being approachable and open about our commitment and responsibilities
• Addressing road safety and speeding traffic in the area
• Providing better and more timely communication re meetings and minutes
• Helping to link the community together
• Finding funding for improvements
• Impacting local planning decisions

We asked you what you would like us to do less of and your feedback was mostly that you couldn’t think of anything, although it was mentioned that you wanted us to:

• Not base our views and actions on the opinions of a few

We asked you what our future priorities should be and the three most stated were (in order of most popular):

1. Vehicle Speeding & Traffic Calming
2. Community facilities
3. Community Space & Playground

Followed by:

• Green space & Environment
• Housing and Planning Matters
• Addressing Litter & Fly Tipping

Some of you were interested in us also focussing on green energy Initiatives and community events.

As you may know, we are already working hard to support and finance speed reduction measures in the Village and have brought Stinchcombe Speed Watch under the Parish Council umbrella to support their efforts more effectively.  The Vehicle-Activated Sign, has been shown to reduce speeds significantly when present, and has been supplemented recently by a permanent community camera on Taits Hill Road; persistent speeders will soon start receiving letters from the Police. We will be looking to install at least one more camera when the next tranche of the Community Speed Watch Fund becomes available.

We have also been supporting the refurbishment of the swings at the Rugby Club and agreed a lease with the Club for the continued use of the land.  In addition, we are supporting the Playground Committee by handling the finances that have been generously pledged by villagers and friends via a crowd funding scheme. Fund raising is progressing well and we anticipate work will start on the development of the community space and playground in the first half of this year.  A section of the church field has been leased to the Parish Council, who will be responsible for its upkeep and insurance.

The Parish Council has now set up some other working groups to help us continue to improve our village for the benefit of all of us and some of our resources will go towards supporting these groups. As we are such a small Council, we can’t do all the work ourselves and do rely on the support of our collective community to continue to make improvements.

We also asked you how you would like to better engage with the Parish Council and how you would like us to communicate with you. You gave us some really interesting feedback which we plan to discuss at the February meeting in more detail and come up with a plan of action that we will then share with you.