Community spirit and responsibility should be fostered with facilities and activities attracting and involving as many residents as possible.
Initiatives which improve the quality of local life and sustainability of the environment should be actively promoted.
The Telford & Wrekin Community Strategy stresses the value of strong communities and the need for agencies, public bodies, organisations and voluntary groups to work together to improve local communities and their services. Local concerns identified of particular relevance to the parish include fear of crime, affordable housing, public transport provision, environmental protection and waste recycling.
The Community Safety Strategy further sets out to build confident communities and create safer, healthier neighbourhoods across the Borough.
Improved access in the rural area is an important objective of the Local Transport Plan, together with improving road safety and reducing reliance on the car.
Although there is some support for the re-establishment of a Post Office and shop in Little Wenlock village, there is serious doubt over the viability of such a business.
The fact that Post Offices and shops are available locally in both Horsehay and Lawley, not to mention the Town Centre, must be important considerations in this respect. As should also be the availability of a weekly mobile shop (currently only used by a small number of older residents) and home-shopping services offered by at least one local supermarket.
Should a strong enough case be made for a Post Office and/or shop in the parish, the new village hall or the Huntsman Inn would be logical locations, allowing them to be combined with existing community facilities for greatest value and cost-effectiveness.
Wider publicity for the existing mobile shop, supermarket home shopping and any other services that could be provided 'at the door' would help meet the need for local facilities and reduce the requirement for car journeys.
Little Wenlock Village Hall is the parish's single most important community resource. The new hall, completed in the summer of 2002, is an excellent, modern facility designed for particular versatility of use which the community wishes to utilise to the maximum.
The main hall is capable of accommodating 300 people. It is complemented by a committee room for up to 50 people, fully equipped catering kitchen and bar area. Existing facilities include a demountable stage and tables & chairs for 100.
Current activities extend to whist, yoga, indoor bowls, keep fit, and art classes, while the Parish Council, WI, Gardening and Lunch Clubs all use the hall for their regular meetings. A Youth Club is planned for 2003.
A wide range of other occasional community gatherings are also held in the hall. These include Christmas fayres, harvest suppers, summer fetes, skittles nights, concerts, race nights, dances and discos. In addition, the building is hired out for weddings and other functions, and commercial use.
While the existing playing field facilities at Little Wenlock are by no means bad for a community of its size, the children's play equipment is both limited and antiquated. Furthermore, annual playground inspections regularly identify safety issues that need to be addressed; often at considerable cost.
Apart from football posts and an activity wall and basketball hoop for ball games, facilities for older children are also sadly lacking.
Under these circumstances, a strong desire for improved and safer play equipment for young children has been identified in community consultations, together with a clear need to extend the play facilities for older children.-
The parish sees improved play equipment for pre-school and primary school children as giving mothers far more opportunity to keep their families occupied locally, instead of having to drive to the Town Park or Wellington. As well as reducing car journeys, this would also increase young family flexibility quite markedly.
At the same time, it believes improved play facilities for older children would do much to reduce the extent to which they currently use local roads within the village for ball games, skating, cycling and other group play, giving obvious safety benefits.
The renovated barn which forms part of the playing field is recognised as an important community asset which could be developed for a variety of uses - including indoor games and activities for young people. This will, however, require major expenditure and an ongoing programme of supervised access to make it viable.
The parish is well-known for its sense of community and the number and range of events and activities organised by its various organisations to bring residents of all ages together and encourage the participation of visitors.
These include village fun days; barn dances; seasonal fetes, fairs and festivals; plant sales; garden open days; and latterly, the Little Wenlock 'Wheeze' cross-country run.
The community is keen to involve as many local people as possible in such events, increasing their 'reach' to involve people from across the entire parish, andY´ attracting visitors and funds from outside it.
It also wishes to encourage the widest participation in the range of regular activities organised by the Gardening Club, Indoor Bowls Club, Lunch Club, Tennis Club and other local interest and community groups.
In company with many rural areas, the parish has suffered from a progressive decline in public transport provision over the years. To such an extent that it is now served by just three buses a week; all of them from Little Wenlock village.
As a result parishioners are effectively deprived of public transport. Those actually living within Little Wenlock village find it difficult to plan their lives around such a skeleton service, while many of those living outside the main village have to travel at least as far to reach the buses as to their destinations. At the same time, the buses tend not to go to the places people need to visit.
A number of older residents do not have cars and, because their breadwinner works outside the parish, families with a single car also find themselves without transport during the working week. There is a clearly identified transport need too amongst teenagers wishing to take advantage of entertainment facilities within the Telford area.
Extra bus services are considered inappropriate to these needs for their inflexibility, even if they could be justified socially or economically. Although a reasonable amount of informal car-sharing takes place, extending this into more formal schemes is also felt to leave a lot to be desired since the variety of destinations and needs means people generally do not want to travel to the same place at the same time.
In place of a better bus service, the parish believes its unmet transport needs would be better served by a specialist Taxi Voucher Scheme offering those who need public transport vouchers for use in payment or part-payment for taxi journeys as and when required.
The fact that pooling their vouchers would make them go very much further is considered a positive encouragement to share journeys, giving an environmental as well as social benefit to such a scheme.
Criminal activity in much of the parish is limited to isolated incidents of theft from cars, houses, garages and sheds, and disposal of cars stolen elsewhere.
The scale of car abandonment (and associated drug-taking) has been markedly reduced in recent years as a result of the closure of what had long been the clear blackspot for this activity - Hatch Lane - and its eventual reclassification to bridleway status.
There remain, however, a number of 'green lanes', no through roads and other isolated areas vulnerable to and occasionally used for both these activities.
Theft, criminal damage and trespass are more common on the farms to the east of the parish (nearest to Lawley and Telford) and poaching of gamebirds and deer is a concern around the woodlands in particular.
Minor incidents of vandalism have taken place around the converted barn on the playing field, which tends to attract youngsters from both within and outside the parish, but again these have tended to be isolated.
Although even the most vulnerable elderly residents do not feel a serious fear of crime, the parish is keen to make crime prevention a priority both to reinforce parishioners sense of safety and to deter criminals.
A Neighbourhood Watch programme has been running within the parish for a number of years - albeit on rather an informal and intermittent basis. Coupled with regular liaison with the West Mercia Constabulary and involvement in the Telford Crime Prevention Panel (with its range of focused initiatives, including Security for the Elderly), an active programme of Neighbourhood Watch throughout the parish is considered to be best local crime prevention strategy.
With no schools in the parish, most children and young people travel to Wellington or Telford for state primary, secondary or tertiary education.
Local needs surrounding education are, consequently, primarily related to access. More specifically these involve the ability to secure places at local primary and secondary schools and transport provision to these and other educational facilities in and around Telford.
The general lack of facilities and employment in the parish and the unavailability of public transport makes it difficult for young people to socialise and obtain part-time or holiday jobs.
While this should be helped by the improvement of playing field facilities and the provision of taxi vouchers, the parish is keen to do more to assist its young people, both in terms of local activities and mobility.
Routine healthcare poses similar access-related issues for residents of the parish. Furthermore, the rural location means emergency medical services tend not to be available as promptly as they are in the urban and suburban parts of the Borough.
Under these circumstances, the parish recognises the need to ensure ambulance crews can rapidly locate patients requiring emergency treatment and are able to establish the critical medical information they need to ensure the best treatment accurately and efficiently.
At the same time, it believes there would be particular value in having a number of local people able to provide immediate life-saving treatment in response to emergencies prior to the arrival of paramedical staff.
With a relatively large population of older people and its isolation from many local services, the parish is keen to provide elderly residents - particularly those without immediate family assistance - with whatever additional home support they may require.
Housework, shopping, laundry and ironing, gardening, fridge and freezer cleaning, pet care, errand-running, odd jobs and form-filling are areas in which extra support may be particularly valued by more vulnerable members of the community. As are advice and guidance on healthcare, residential and nursing care, group activities and social service entitlements.
Given its potential to secure local employment, strengthen the community and reduce the need for travel to work, the parish is keen to do everything possible to encourage home-working whether as part of full, part-time or self-employment.
In particular, it wishes to see the extension of broad-band telecommunications access to all parishioners and the development of self-help activities which bring home-workers together and provide support for home-based businesses.
As part of its commitment to environmental sustainability and minimising the need for landfill, the parish is keen to encourage as much waste reduction, re-use, recycling and home composting as possible.
A paperbank and bottle bank, together with aluminium and steel can and aluminium foil recycling facilities are already provided in Little Wenlock village. As yet, however, no facilities are available in New Works. Local initiatives have also been undertaken to encourage Christmas tree recycling and the home-composting of organic waste.
Improved and extended recycling facilities have been identified as a priority by the community, together with a regular village skip service for non-recyclable waste to reduce journeys to the nearest public amenity site - approximately twice the distance of the past since the closure of Stoney Hill.
These improvements can best be achieved by working closely with the Borough's expanding recycling effort, as well as maintaining and developing a range of independent initiatives.
While the company still has a presence in the parish, the assistance of local landfill operator, Onyx may usefully be sought to provide a community skip service.
Recent incidents of prolonged power and water supply failure resulting from severe weather, as well as concerns over fire and other local authority cover and services, have underlined the need for the parish to plan effectively to support its residents in the event of emergencies.
It is considered particularly important to have designated points of official community contact with the relevant service providers to co-ordinate information flow in both directions - reporting problems and issues to the authorities on the one hand and feeding back progress and actions to the community on the other.
An up-to-date contact register of individuals with particular medical, safety, law and order, counselling and craft skills who may be called upon in response to specific emergencies is also felt to be vital.
There are a wide range of services available locally - from a mobile shop and library to home-shopping via the Internet, community nursing, meals on wheels, pastoral care, public amenity sites and recycling facilities.
At the same time, a wide range of activities are run by a variety of community groups and organisations on both a regular and occasional basis.
The parish recognises the value of ensuring residents are as well informed as possible of local services and activities, helping them take the greatest advantage of the services available and encouraging the greatest participation in the activities organised. This is considered to be an especially important community-building measure.
In addition to noticeboards in both main villages, a Parish Information sheet listing a large number of the most valuable services and activities, together with contact numbers, is up-dated and distributed regularly. An occasional Community News sheet is also produced and distributed to communicate developments, Parish Council news and details of other local activities and events.
A number of possibilities have been identified for enhancing community information provision, including:
The Little Wenlock Parish Plan will be implemented by the community under the guidance of Little Wenlock Parish Council according to the following overall action plan.
Each year the Parish Council will report on the progress achieved over the past twelve months and produce a specific plan of action for the coming year. This will ensure the momentum of action is maintained and the entire community is as fully informed and involved as possible.