Parish Matters 31

Last night we held the first parish council meeting of the year in the Church, the next three PC meetings will also be held in the Church as personal schedules and conflicting dates mean the Village Hall is not available.

A subject that took up a great deal of time was the preparation for the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). Hannah-Louise, our Clerk, has been following developments with SALC and NALC and advised the Parish Council that we need to put in place guidelines and policies to comply with the GDPR. So the Parish Council adopted and updated policies on Privacy Policy, Freedom of Information Guidelines, Document Retention Guidelines and Data Protection Guidelines. These documents will of course be publicly available via the Sutton, Bignor and Barlavington website.

In order to comply and update our database for the purposes of communicating with residents we are obliged to send an email to each of you who currently receive emails from us asking for your consent to remain on our database list to receive emails. To be absolutely clear our new policy, and to comply with GDPR, means we will only email you for the purpose of communicating information related to the Village that falls in the remit of the Parish Council, such as gritting schedules, road closures etc. So early in February you will receive an email from us asking for your permission to remain on our database, if you wish to be on the list you MUST respond to that email and agree. If we do not hear from you within 2 weeks, we will be obliged by law to remove your email address from our database we will not send and further communication.

John Dwane bought to the Parish Councils attention a talk on scamming that police deliver to communities, we were delighted to liaise with John and fixed a date that suited both parishes, consequently I am indebted to John for hosting the talk on Saturday, January 6th in the village hall. The police came along to the village hall and gave an excellent talk on phone, internet and door scams and how coincidental factors often take in the most savvy of us. For those that attended, sadly I was unable to, residents would have seen short films of those effected or heard from the audience of personal stories. The Parish Council will make any links available so those that missed the presentation so they may get access and an insight to this subject.

Finally, it was raised at the last AGM that the old road into Sutton has no status, it is no longer a road, nor is it a registered footpath. We are now commencing the official procedure to secure this path as a public footpath, and give it the status many had long thought it had. We will keep you updated on our progress as we move forward.

John Cross
Chair Sutton and Barlavington Parish Council
Next Meeting 5th March 2018 Sutton Church at 7.30pm