Town Clerk awarded BEM in Birthday honours
THAME’S Town Clerk, Helen Stewart, has been awarded an BEM in the Queen’s Birthday Honour’s List, ‘For services to neighbourhood planning in Thame, Oxfordshire’.
As Clerk to Thame Town Council, Helen Stewart has been instrumental in helping the town council draw up and implement Thame’s Neighbourhood Plan, which made history as the first ever housing application for a Neighbourhood Plan to be approved, and which was described as ‘a Trail blazer’, by Government Minister, Nick Boles.
Although parts of the Neighbourhood Plan and the way some designated sites for development were included in it, continue to be controversial, Helen Stewart has been a staunch supporter and defender of the plan and the robustness of the the council’s procedures in drawing it up.
Since the plan was approved by local referendum, new housing developments, and a commercial development more recently, have been passed by the planning authority.
The current Mayor of Thame, Cllr Jeannette Matelot Green, said: ‘’I am delighted that Helen’s invaluable contribution has been recognised in this way, and Thame should be proud of her achievement. I have every confidence that she will bring the same diligence and commitment to the ongoing process of monitoring delivery of the Plan.’’
You can read the full citation for Helen’s award and the reaction of town councillors, on the town council’s website here: LINK
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I haven’t read all the stuff about the latest planning proposals and I’m happy to be corrected if I’ve got anything wrong, but I wonder just what the input of the whole town – all the meetings about the Town Plan, the discussions, letters, anxiety among residents and residents’ groups, and the expense, most of all to Thame Town Council, and that will have been very great – will have counted for when the developers move in. It does make one wonder whether we all trustingly bothered to take part. Our Town Clerk is the Town Clerk. Her work has clearly been beyond the call of the duty she fulfilled so expertly. I would have thought an MBE was the least she deserved. I don’t know why I bother by now, getting towards 80 years old but this seems to be the kind of situation which my dealings with officialdom in various places, have pre-occupied me for more than 50 years.