Cllr Tom Tyson

29/04/2026

HERTFORDSHIRE'S SEND IMPROVEMENT NOTICE HAS BEEN LIFTED

Within one year of the Lib Dem team taking control of Hertfordshire County Council, the government has announced that the SEND Improvement Notice has been lifted.

When the Lib Dem team took control last year, improving SEND services was one of their top priorities.

This is welcome recognition by the government that Hertfordshire has made a lot of progress.

The Lib Dems will keep campaigning for the government to fix the broken funding formula which penalises Hertfordshire and to fix the SEND system for the long term.

24/04/2026

Join us tomorrow, Saturday 25 April for the Community Surgery. It's a fantastic opportunity to discuss any matters of interest or concern with your Councillors. See you there!😃
📆Saturday 25 April
🕗10:30am to 12pm
📍Tesco High Street, Baldock

24/04/2026

My council motion to protect our chalk streams in the face of imminent large-scale housing development passed unanimously last night. The full motion can be viewed on the NHC website and as always the meeting is available to watch on YouTube.

Here is a summary in the form of a press release:

North Herts Council passed a motion on Thursday 23 April aimed at protecting the district’s precious chalk streams. Cllr Tom Tyson (LD) presented the motion, which was seconded by Cllr Louise Peace (LD).

The motion notes the passage of a bill being brought through parliament by Liberal Democrat MP in neighbouring South Cambridgeshire, Pippa Heylings, which aims at giving the UK’s chalk streams protected status as a UNESCO Natural World Heritage Site.

The motion also focused on a local level at the opportunity for the Council to act in its capacity as planning authority to ensure protections are written into the new Local Plan, which is currently being developed. The Council must do “everything possible to protect its unique chalk streams and the irreplaceable habitats associated with them” the motion states.

In moving the motion, Cllr Tyson hoped that it would allow the Council to demand from planning applicants “a full commitment to the cause” and that developments should feature the highest levels of water efficiency, maximum safeguards against pollution and best-in-class sustainable drainage systems as a matter of course.

Referring to high levels of ground water abstraction to supply homes, he went on to say: “We must protect the integrity of our aquifer wherever we are exploiting it as a resource, until such time as the water companies get their act together and start putting into place the infrastructure required to supply us from a less ecologically fragile source.”

Seconding the motion, Cllr Peace spoke of the harms suffered by chalk streams in her area due to sewage spills and housing development. She spoke of the obligation North Herts Council has to protect them and referred to the Council’s declaration of an ecological emergency in 2023.

The motion was passed unanimously, with one abstention.

07/04/2026

15/03/2026

The public consultation about Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) is still open until 26 March. I’ve had a number of queries from people in Ashwell and the other villages in our Arbury ward about the issue and how it may affect us. It’s a big change we're facing and there’s a lot to consider.

First, by way of some background:

The government decided that Hertfordshire should be one of the next group of counties to come under the LGR process. Our local government will therefore stop being divided into the two tiers of county council and district/borough councils. Currently, the county council looks after the “big stuff” like social care, education and children’s services, highways, and waste disposal, whereas the districts/boroughs do the more local administration such as planning, leisure services and waste collection.

This is going to end in May 2028, when Hertfordshire County Council and all the district/borough councils in the county will cease to exist, including North Herts. They will be replaced by so-called Unitary Authorities (UAs), each of which will be responsible for administering all of the services the two-tier system was in charge of.

The question we’re now being asked is this: how many UAs should be created to serve us in Hertfordshire – two, three or four? Would it be better to be governed by a larger or smaller authority, given the services they would have to provide? There are maps on the LGR website - link below.

There is a tension between having a larger authority with good resources and greater economic flexibility and therefore viability due to its size, and a smaller one with a more local touch but less financial ability to provide major services like adult social care – which currently accounts for 47% of HCC’s £1.2bn budget, for example.

I think it’s a difficult decision but at the end of the day there’s no point choosing a system that can’t afford to deliver the services we need, so the 2-unitary must be the best option on that basis.

There’s another problem, and I know many of you are aware of it. The 4UA option in the submission being sent to the government only works if North Herts district is cut in half, putting Arbury in an eastern unitary with Royston, Buntingford, Bishops Stortford and Broxbourne, separated from our neighbours in Baldock and Letchworth, for example. What implications would that have for our service provision?

The short answer is that we just don’t know for sure. Whilst we know what services the UAs will be responsible for, we don’t know how they will arrange to provide them.

There won’t necessarily be an issue with school transfers as Academies (e.g. KTS) can define their own admission criteria and can accept pupils from another local authority if they choose. Hopefully things would continue as they are, but we don’t know. Royston and Buntingford have a three-tier school system with first, middle and upper schools, so there would be a problem with any system that wanted to integrate Ashwell with them.

Planning could become more complex, as we have a new Local Plan in the works which is set to be completed in time for the big change in 2028. It will still have statutory force then but if the 4UA proposal were adopted it would somehow have to be jointly administered by two separate planning authorities, as the current North Herts planning area would then be spread across two of the new unitaries. And I don’t know how the government-imposed housing targets would be allocated for an area that covered parts of two different authorities.

Library services currently provided by HCC would have to be managed by the new unitaries. Again, it would seem sensible to do that on as large as scale as possible.

The same would apply to waste disposal: each new authority would have to come up with its own arrangements and contracts with the biomass boiler and incinerator operators – unless they clubbed together to provide a joint service. This is something the proposal is asking the government to allow, in an acknowledgement that having multiple smaller UAs competing for the same services is not going to make those services cheaper for anyone.

The huge areas of adult and children’s social care would also be hard to provide viably on a small scale. In the 4UA model, the central one would probably be unable to fund its social services and would have to be subsidised by the others and/or the government.

Full details of the proposals are shown on the LGR website https://www.hertfordshire-lgr.co.uk/

Do have a look and check out the consultation here https://consult.communities.gov.uk/local-government-reorganisation/hertfordshire/consultation/ It’s a simple format with drop-down choices and a box for comments on each of the three options.

Our North Herts Council voted in favour of two unitaries but the minority administration and their Cabinet chose to back a four-unitary system, so that’s the official NHC position. I did get them to accept that Arbury should be in the same central unitary as Baldock and Letchworth if there had to be four, so a “side letter” advocating that was appended to the joint submission by HCC and the districts/boroughs to the government. I have no idea what weight it will carry.

If you’re minded to support the 4UA option in the consultation, you have the opportunity to use the comments box to explain that Arbury should be in the central unitary. Even if you would prefer a different number of unitaries, it would still be good to recommend keeping Arbury with its neighbours in the event the 4-unitary option wins out, and the questionnaire allows you to do that.

At the end of the day, the government will decide which system we get and we will have to work with that. Let’s hope it’s not to the detriment of our Arbury villages.

The consultation period closes on 26 March.

Sorry this has been so long-winded but I hope it helps a little to explain the situation we're being asked to comment on. Please don't hesitate to contact me for more details on [email protected]

This website has been designed to: Inform and educate Hertfordshire residents on what Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) is, and how it impacts them. Provide Hertfordshire residents with the opportunity to have their say – we really want to hear from our communities.

27/02/2026

Stop by for a chat about the issues affecting us locally.

Join us Saturday 28 February for the Community Surgery. It's a fantastic opportunity to discuss any matters of interest or concern with your Councillors. See you there!😃
📆Saturday 28 February
🕗10:30am to 12pm
📍Tesco High Street, Baldock

22/01/2026

See you there! Lots to talk about!

13/12/2025

29/11/2025

26/11/2025

Following the tragic collision at the Slip End junction last Friday in which two men died, many people have once again called for changes to make the A505 between Baldock and Royston safer.

The best solution would be to change the road and in particular the junctions to bring the road up to modern standards – or at very least the worst section between Slip End and Odsey. However even if that was agreed (and it would need the government to provide the many tens of millions it would cost) this would take years to do.

A much quicker solution would be to reduce the speed limit and perhaps provide more speed cameras on that most dangerous section.

Some will remember that a few years ago we launched a petition to do just that but it was rejected by the council. This week I have spoken to the Herts County Council highways officers and they have agreed that lowering the speed limit and potentially installing average speed cameras is something that they will look at.

Cutting speeds will not solve all the problems on this section of the A505 but it can only help reduce the number of collisions that take place.

I will keep up the pressure to get this done.